Cameras

All camera work happens on the Cameras page: discovery, adding, credentials, groups and tags, and per-camera health.

Discovering cameras

CoreSight can find cameras on the network three ways:

• ONVIF discovery — the standard broadcast discovery most IP cameras answer. Finds ONVIF-capable cameras on the same network segment as the box.
• Hikvision SADP — Hikvision's native discovery protocol, which finds Hikvision cameras even before they have an IP address configured.
• Subnet scan — an active sweep of a network range you specify (for example 172.16.0.0/24). Use this when cameras live on a different, routed network (a camera VLAN behind a router), where broadcast discovery cannot reach them.

Run a discovery from the Cameras page, review the found devices, and enroll the ones you want.

Adding a camera manually

If discovery cannot find a camera, add it by hand:

1. On the Cameras page, choose to add a camera.
2. Enter the camera's address and its RTSP URL (the stream path — check the camera vendor's documentation; for supported vendors CoreSight can derive it for you).
3. Enter the camera's username and password. Credentials are stored encrypted on the box and are never shown again in plain text.
4. Save. The camera connects and appears in the list.

If the camera fails to connect, the error tells you whether the camera was unreachable (network problem) or rejected the credentials (wrong username/password) — see Troubleshooting.

Native drivers vs. Generic ONVIF

Each camera in the list carries a badge:

• Native — CoreSight recognized the vendor and uses its native protocol (Hikvision, Dahua, Axis, Hanwha, Uniview, Vivotek). Native cameras get the vendor's full capabilities: richer discovery, PTZ, vendor event streams, and device settings.
• Generic ONVIF — any other camera, driven through standard ONVIF and RTSP. Live view, recording, playback, and PTZ (where the camera supports ONVIF PTZ) all work; only vendor-specific extras are unavailable.

The badge is informational — you don't choose a driver, CoreSight probes and binds the best one automatically.

Credentials, groups, and tags

• Credentials can be updated on any camera without re-adding it — useful after a password rotation on the camera side.
• Groups collect cameras into named sets (e.g. "Parking", "Lobby") for organizing the list and scoping views.
• Tags are free-form labels for filtering.

Roles can also be scoped to specific cameras — see Users and roles.

PTZ control

For cameras with pan-tilt-zoom, the live view exposes PTZ controls: continuous move (hold to pan/tilt/zoom) and presets — saved positions you can recall with one click. PTZ works on both native and ONVIF-driven cameras that support it.

Camera health

CoreSight probes every camera continuously and detects an offline camera in under 30 seconds:

• The camera list and live tiles show each camera's online/offline status.
• The Health page gives the fleet-wide view — every camera's state plus storage-pool status — and a per-camera drill-in with the recent status history.

An offline camera raises attention in the UI; recording resumes automatically when the camera comes back.

Device settings

For supported cameras, CoreSight can read and edit settings on the camera itself — time and NTP, image settings, encoding, and on-screen display — from the camera's settings drawer on the Cameras page. If a camera doesn't support remote settings, the drawer says so; nothing breaks.