IP Camera - Streaming video with the basic authentication on Chrome - google-chrome

Question

I have an Amcrest IP Camera. I would like to stream video to my web page.
Its url is rtsp://mycamera.com:5554/stream
In order to get the stream of the camera, the camera has a following API http://mycamera.com/video.mjpg
It requires the basic authentication to work.
By formatting the URL and putting it into the image tag like below, I can make it work on Firefox, Safari
<img src="http://username:password#mycamera.com/video.mjpg" />
However, Chrome (v.40 on mine) does not allow this kind of URL, the browser will promt the user password form to be filled, or simply refuses the request. Setting header Authorization: "Basic encode64(username, password)" in the script does not help, the URL always return 401 error (Unauthorized)
Sometimes, it raises the CORS error. If my website is running with HTTPS, the HTTP API call will get blocked by the browser.

Answer 1

Disable authentication of IP camera:
If the camera does not have that option on the admin panel, just add an user without a password with any username like "none", then we can setup like this
<iframe src="http://none:#mycamera.com/video.mjpg" width="1280" height="768"></iframe>
Without password, my Chrome no longer throws the user name/password. (tested on Chrome of Windows and MacOSX & Safari)
Proxy the output to my own website's server:
Download the framework CORS of the mohsen1
Install node js and run this server on the same with domain of the website. We need to edit the index.js file as below
var fs = require('fs');
var request = require('request');
var http = require('http');
var https = require('https');
var privateKey = fs.readFileSync('/var/private_key.pem', 'utf8');
var certificate = fs.readFileSync('/var/certificate.crt, 'utf8');
var credentials = {key: privateKey, cert: certificate};
var express = require('express');
var proxy_http_port = 9009
var proxy_https_port = 9443
var app = express();
// your express configuration here
var auth = "";
app.use(function (req, res, next) {
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*');
res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers', 'Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept');
next();
});
var t = app.get('/', function (req, res, next) {
var username = "";
var password = "";
if (req.query.auth) {
username = req.query.auth.split(":")[0];
password = req.query.auth.split(":")[1];
auth = 'Basic ' + new Buffer(username + ':' + password).toString('base64');
res.header('Authorization', auth);
} else {
res.send('please specify auth query param');
}
if (req.query.url) {
var options = {
method: 'GET',
url: req.query.url,
headers: {
"Authorization": auth,
//'User-Agent': req.headers['user-agent']
},
encoding: null
};
var r = request(options, function callback(error, response, body) {
if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
res.write(body);
delete response.headers['access-control-allow-origin'];
}
}).pipe(res);
} else {
res.send('You have to specify URL query');
}
});
http.globalAgent.maxSockets = 100;
var httpServer = http.createServer(app);
var httpsServer = https.createServer(credentials, app);
httpServer.listen(proxy_http_port);
httpsServer.listen(proxy_https_port);
Encode the video stream URL below:
http://mycamera.com/video.mjpg
to:
http%3A%2F%2Fmycamera.com%2Fvideo.mjpg
The URL of stream video should be
https://mywebsite.com:9443/?auth=username:password&url=(put above encoded video URL here)
THe advantage of this approach is to bypass most of problems around and get rid of the errors(CORS, HTTPS) because my website will request to its own server
The drawback is the video would be fetch twice, it caused delay pretty much.

Answer 2

Error 401 means invalid credentials so there's a good chance you are simply not formatting the basic auth string correctly. The header format should be Authorization Basic [base64 encoded username:password] using a colon symbol : to separate the two before encoding that entire string into base 64.
For example the resulting header should look something like this:
Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l
You can try installing the Chrome "Advanced REST Client" plugin and use that plugin to test accessing your URL link with basic auth parameters. If you can get it to work with the REST client plugin then go back and update your script to fix the format of the auth headers.
Link to Advanced REST Client:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-client/hgmloofddffdnphfgcellkdfbfbjeloo?hl=en-US
Link to auth headers format info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication