Reading from an IP camera

To finish with cv2.VideoCapture, we are going to see how we can read from an IP camera. Reading from an IP camera in OpenCV is very similar to reading from a file. In this sense, only the parameter to the constructor of cv2.VideoCapture should be changed. The good thing about this is that you do not need an IP camera in your local network to try this functionality. There are many public IP cameras you can try to connect. For example, we are going to connect to an IP public camera, which is placed at Club Nàutic Port de la Selva – Costa Brava – Cap de Creus (Girona, Spain). The web page of this port is hosted at https://www.cnps.cat/. You can navigate to the webcam sections (https://www.cnps.cat/webcams/) to find some webcams to connect with.

Therefore, the only thing you have to modify is the parameter that's given to cv2.VideCapture. In this case, it's http://217.126.89.102:8010/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi. If you execute this example (read_ip_camera.py), you should see something similar to the following screenshot, where both the BGR and the grayscale images that were obtained from the IP camera are shown: