Live View on Desktop

[patric]

If you were (or still are) a Windows 7 user, you probably remember Sidebar Gadgets... compact apps that ran on the desktop.
If you owned a surveillance camera made by Panasonic, Axis or Cannon you also might have had live views of one or more cameras on your desktop (roughly resembling a Live Tile in Windows 10) thanks to a piece of freeware called CoconutView.

Gadgets (and the Sidebar) went out with Windows 7. Gone is the very cool convenience of having an immediate, persistent camera view (albeith a thumbnail) without having to fiddle with anything.

Heres more info and a link to download the software (yes you still can!)
http://www.komaromi.com/coconutview/

Amcrest: Bring it back. Put your cameras on Live Tiles in Windows 10, or something functionally similar.

CoconutViewScreenshot.jpg (189.31 KiB) Viewed 766 times

[longedge]

Another way, I imagine that most users will have VLC installed which allows mulitple players and is very easy to setup in a similar way if all you want to do is monitor a few cameras.

sshot.jpg (236.68 KiB) Viewed 760 times

[patric]

Another way, I imagine that most users will have VLC installed which allows mulitple players and is very easy to setup in a similar way if all you want to do is monitor a few cameras.

Is there a way to have the streams show up on the desktop automatically or do you have to set it up every time you start windows?

[longedge]

Hmm.... I'm pretty sure you could have three instances of VLC in your startup folder but it's whether you can invoke VLC with a specific RTSP stream open that is the real question. Perhaps a shortcut with parameters??

I can't test it out at the moment. I re-boot my PC once in a blue moon and when I do it struggles to find the system drive. It's on the list of things to do, remove & clean the SSD Drive but at the moment it usually comes down to a hefty emgineers tap on the case

[longedge]

I have VLC installed in the folder D:\VLC.

I've been able to create 3 x working shortcuts on my desktop, one for each of my cameras using :-

Code: Select all

D:\VLC\vlc.exe rtsp://admin:[email protected]_for_camera:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0

so those could just be dragged into my startup folder.

The shortcomings are that VLC doesn't open in the minimal interface or sized correctly but I would guess that might be an additional parameter or setting but for now that's me done.

[longedge]

update - VLC settings allow starting up in minimal view so that is out of the way. I've got results googling "VLC remember last window size" but haven't worked that one out yet. It does appear to be an item somewhere in preferences (which are very wide ranging and allow a tremendous degree of customization - if you can find the option you're looking for).