D-Link DCS-900 IP camera is a flipping bargain

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Company: D-Link
Product: DCS-900 IP camera appliance (wired ethernet)
Price: $81 (Amazon.com clearance, free US ground shipping)
Resolution: 640x480 images (JPEG), MJPEG video streaming

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IF YOU ever thought about getting a permanent web cam up and running, perhaps to monitor your home while away or just to show your neighbourhood view to the Interweb audience, the D-Link DCS-900 is one bargain that you don't want to miss, here's why.

What's included: camera, stand, and power brick

Back in 2004 I started playing with setting up a permanent web cam, actually, two of them, for the world to see a view of the Buenos Aires skyline and streets as seen from my flat. I used a pair of cheap $25 USB webcams, but this presented a number of problems:

• Cheap USB webcams tend to have poor linux drivers, and mine was no exception. I pulled my hair trying to make the linux USB drivers for the chinese web cam chipset to work, until I eventually gave up.
• Even when I used the USB webcams on Windows, the drivers were apparently of very poor quality, were not MSFT-signed code, and caused stability problems when left running all the time, requiring me to kill the web cam application periodically to keep the camera alive.
• Regardless of your OS choice and drivers availability, USB webcams tie your camera to a computer. Reboot, OS upgrade, defrag, maintenance, whatever, and your web cam is suddenly offline. Not good!.
• Even if you decide that leaving your camera dependent on your PC's health is ok, USB webcams tend to be bandwidth hogs on the USB bus, slowing down other USB peripherals on the same bus and eating lots of CPU cycles from your PC.

An IP-based camera like the DCS-900, on the other hand, has several advantages:

• It's a tcp/ip appliance, no PC needed to work. In fact you can shutdown your whole lan and all your PCs and leave just your broadband link, router and IP camera powered up, and you'll still have a working camera.
• OS-independent. Well, you could be running Netware, OS/2, Solaris or CP/M, the camera works independently, and in the case of the DCS-900, streaming is done in standard Motion-JPEG codec (MJPEG), and using a Java applet, so viewer compatibility is guaranteed.

Installation
Installing the DCS-900 was a painless experience. I managed to misplace the printed manual, so out of desperation I headed to the D-Link web site, and there I found, not only the latest software revisions (including a windows video capture application dated late 2005), install wizard, and firmware updates, but also the install guide as a PDF. Unlike other companies that hide and bury drivers and information, D-Link offers you the whole shebang on its support page. Very nice!.

After drilling a few holes to place it outside my window (note the DCS-900 is intended to be used internally, but I placed it inside a clear plastic enclosure protecting it from rain), I connected the power supply to it and a RJ45 ethernet cable to its back connector. The unit's LEDs blinked, and when I fired the Firefox web browser pointing to the unit's default IP address (192.168.0.20), I was already inside the web management interface, changing the default username/password (which is two blanks), and the unit's IP address to match my LAN scheme.

The sturdy metal base makes aiming and securing it a no-brainer

If you use a different subnet in your home lan (say 10.x.y.z), you can change the unit's IP address without touching your PC config, just run the provided (windows-based) D-Link setup wizard, and it will look up the unit on the LAN by its MAC address, and offer you an option to reset its IP address to one of your liking.

The DCS900 looking at the B.A. skyline - Just protect it as it isn't made for outdoor use

I signed up for a free 30 day trial to the TZO.com dynamic DNS service, and obtained a virtual hostname in the format hostname.mynetgear.net (not the actual URL). I then loaded my broadband router config screen and forwarded inbound traffic to port 81 to the D-Link unit's IP address (10.x.y.z). Bingo. That's it. I loaded http://myhostname.mynetgear.net:81, provided the username/password and I was looking at my webcam! In total, I had the unit working in 20 minutes, drilling included!.

Web configuration: as easy as clicking

One nice feature is that the unit allows you to have the administrator login and password separate from "user" accounts (which can only view the camera's output, but cannot access any of the configuration screens). All this is setup using the config screens and your favourite web browser.

Done: web camera up and running for the World+dog to see!

In short: my DCS900-based public web cam is up and running, and before you ask, let me say that I don't want to kill my limited upstream with thousands of INQ readers flooding my ADSL connection. So if you want the URL, ask nicely and I'll share it with you. At $81 greenbacks, and with free continental US ground shipping, it was one of the best investments I've made. I just wish I had realized about these units before pulling my virtual hair for months with my previous USB based setup. While this unit might look a bit outdated - DLink offers versions now which do wonders like pan-and-tilt, digital zooming, etc. but these come at a considerably higher price. Cameras with two-way audio are also available, but all those bells and whistles were way beyond my simple needs. The "old" DCS-900 excels due to its simplicity.

The internals
I was going to tear the unit apart like I do with most of my hardware purchases, but the author of the Linux software for it saved me a lot of time. According to his web page the main guts of the DCS-900 are a a SGS STV0676 video processor, which does RGB, YCrCb, and MJPEG encoding of the video signal, plus a RDC R1610 16 bits RISC processor, and a VIA VT6103 Ethernet controller.

If you don't like the provided web screens with the D-Link logo supplied by the web cam to the viewers, you can get rid of the frames-based HTML design and go straight to the individual pages, for instance http://(camera-ip-address):81/Jview.htm goes straight to the java-based video streaming page. (I'm using port 81 as an example, you can change the unit's TCP/IP port at will, most IPSs block inbound port 80 connections to prevent home users from running their own web servers, so it's safe to say port 81 will work just fine for you). The URL http://(camera-ip-address):81/IMAGE.JPG will give you a "single frame". You can use this url from your own, custom PHP or JSP script, to fetch frames and do whatever you want with them. If you do your own script that fetches individual frames, just make sure you supply "http://(camera-ip-address):81/Jview.htm" as the http-referer on each http request. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you probably won't be making your own web scripts, so move on.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good

• WIRED ETHERNET, no Wi-Fi mess!. No signal loss, no struggling with Wi-Fi config. Security is as good as your Cat5e ethernet cable. ;-). Come on, if you are going to drill a hole to supply power to it, you can drill another hole and make a run of ethernet cable to it as well. Even with Wi-Fi versions you need to drill holes to supply power to it!.
• Bult-in web server
• Inexpensive: at $81, it's a bargain for Cheap B*stards like me. I've even seen brain-damaged USB webcams that are more expensive than this one.
• Easy setup. If you managed to configure your broadband router/firewall, and you're the average techie INQ reader, this will be a piece of cake.
• Standards-based web setup. Worked on Firefox and the Mozilla Suite, flawlessly.
• Java-based video streaming works very well, and lets viewers use whatever OS they want.
• It's an IP appliance not affected by PC hiccups. It just works, at least as long as there's power supplied to it and working TCP/IP infrastructure behind it.
• Unit purchased from Amazon.com back in September already contained the latest firmware version, saving me from having to download and install the available updates.
• No need to get a fixed-IP broadband link. The unit supports popular DNS services that give you a fixed subdomain name, even if your IP address changes regularly (DynDNS.org, TZO.com, DHS.org).
• There's even linux software available for monitoring and recording the camera's output, coded by a third party. See here.

The Bad

• Included power supply is 110v-only. Come on D-Link, an auto switching, multi-voltage PS is the norm these days, and it's probably to include on on every unit, rather than procure two different PS models and discriminate between your US and Euro units. Nothing that a 220v-to-110v transformer can't fix, though.
• Default image/video resolution is 320x200. Get into the config screens immediately and change it to the unit's maximum resolution, 640x480.
• Dynamic DNS services support seems to be hard coded to the 3 commercial services listed above. It would be nice if it allowed the user to manually enter a URL to be hit (custom script on a user's web hosting account) by the unit. What happens if one of all of these commercial services go under?.

The Ugly

• There's no option to disable the "ActiveX" button from being shown. Being a Java die-hard, I expect people who visit my webcam to use the Java based streaming, and if they just hit the ActiveX button by mistake or laziness, see that it doesn't work (because I didn't upload the .ocx control to a web host), and either use the java streaming, or move elsewhere. ;-)
• No firmware hacks or extensions that I know of. Come on, D-Link!, you know it makes snese!. (If you know of any, please let me know).

The Verdict
I give this camera five Fernandos in my personal One-to-Five scale. Rarely have I come across a product that is as solid as this one, and which supports cross-platform standards. Kudos to D-Link! µ