How to add sites and cameras

Everything in Camzify hangs off a site: a physical location that groups its cameras. This guide covers creating one, connecting cameras to it over RTSP or HTTPS, and confirming the stream works before anything is built on top of it.

1

Create the site first

A site is a physical location that groups its cameras, a warehouse, a campus, a storefront. Create it with a name, address and an optional contact number before adding anything else. Getting sites right early matters more than it looks: site is the unit that access, reporting and notification filtering are all organized around later, so a fleet dumped into one site is hard to delegate afterwards.

2

Add the camera and give it a name someone will recognize

Add each camera against its site, name it, and set its resolution. Name it for the place rather than the hardware, "Loading Dock B" tells a guard reading an alert at 2am where to go, and "Cam 14" does not. The name follows the camera into patrol reports and alerts, so it is worth a moment.

3

Choose the stream type

HTTPS covers HLS and WebRTC sources, which play directly. RTSP covers camera URLs; a publicly reachable RTSP stream is pulled straight from its URL. RTMP is the third option, where the camera or encoder pushes to an ingest address that Camzify generates for it.

4

For cameras on a local network, install the Connector

If the camera sits behind a router or firewall with no public route, install the Camzify Connector on a Windows, macOS or Linux machine on that network. It makes an outbound connection and relays the stream, so no port has to be opened and the camera is never exposed to the internet. It carries PTZ control for those cameras too.

5

Verify the stream before you depend on it

Use Test Stream in the camera form, then check the tile in live streaming to confirm footage is actually flowing. Do this before building patrol sequences on the camera. A stream that authenticated once but drops is the failure that quietly empties a patrol report later.