How to: Use the Aware Camera Proxy to access third-party cameras

Last modified: Thursday October 13, 2022.

Setting up the Avigilon Alta Alta Aware Camera Proxy to enable you to easily access the user interfaces for your third-party cameras involves the following top-level steps:

  1. Configure your Alta Aware software to enable the Alta Aware Camera Proxy.
  2. Download the Alta Aware Camera Proxy software.
  3. Use the Alta Aware Camera Proxy to connect to the relevant third-party camera user interface.

The Alta Aware Camera Proxy relies on the camera being suitably configured to allow access using basic authentication/digest authentication.

If the camera is not suitably configured, you will not be automatically logged into the camera when using the Alta Aware Camera Proxy, and will need to manually log into the camera user interface.

Task — Enable Camera Proxy in Aware

  1. Log in to Alta Aware as an Administrator.
  2. Click New tool, then select Servers tool buttonSystem.
  3. Select the Cloud Connector group where you want to enable the Camera Proxy.
  4. Enable the Camera Proxy from the Cloud Connector group settings dialog.

Task — Download the Alta Aware Camera Proxy software

  1. Download the Alta Aware Camera Proxy executable file by clicking the relevant link:
  2. Save the executable file to a suitable location on your computer.

Task — Connect to the third-party camera interface

  1. From within Alta Aware, open the Devices tool, and select the third-party camera you wish to access.
  2. From the browser address bar, copy the universally unique identifier (UUID) for the device.

    The UUID is the string of numbers and letters that follows https://<Aware address>/devices/ and that precedes any ?site= information.

  3. Open a command line interface, browse to the directory containing the downloaded aware-cam-proxy.exe file, and enter:
    aware-cam-proxy-<os> -a <url> -u <"username"> -d <uuid>.
    Where:
    • <os> — the operating system you are using, either win or linux.
    • <url> — the URL or IP address for your Aware Cloud deployment.
    • <"username"> — the Alta Aware account being used to access the camera.

      If the user name contains spaces, the whole username must be placed within quotes.

    • <uuid> — the device-specific identifier for the relevant camera.
  4. Enter the password.
  5. If the Aware Cloud user account is configured to require two-factor authentication (2FA), when prompted, enter the 2FA value.

    If the Aware Cloud user is configured to use 2FA and you are not prompted for the 2FA value, make sure you are running the latest version of the camera proxy. This can be checked by running the command aware-cam-proxy-<os> -v.

    Aware Camera Proxy builds with a build time equal to or later than 2021-07-22 includes support for 2FA.

  6. On successful validation of the provided information, a browser window opens, and the user interface for the selected camera is displayed.