The good news is that video surveillance software doesn't actually care where its video comes from. A camera, to a VMS, is just a stream — and there are plenty of ways to produce one. In an earlier article we listed 9 things you can use instead of a surveillance camera. Here we'll zoom in on three of the most useful ones in detail: smartphone cameras, USB webcams, and even plain video files — and how to turn each into something your VMS will happily ingest, often as an RTSP stream.

1. Use a phone or tablet camera as a surveillance camera

A phone is the most accessible spare camera there is. To press it into service you need a surveillance app, and those come in a few flavours:

• Cloud apps (account required). You install the app, create an account, point the phone at what you want to watch, and the video goes to the provider's cloud, where it's processed; you view it and get alerts through your account. Simplest to start, but your footage lives on someone else's servers.

• Standalone (on-device) apps. Rarer, but interesting: the app records and processes locally on the phone itself, with no account and no cloud. On Android this can run essentially on its own, and the footage stays on your device and network. If you're looking for apps of this type, you should probably try Xeoma - apart from working in extreme conditions, it also offers a free mode.

• Streaming-source apps (the RTSP route). This is the one that literally turns the phone into a network camera. An app such as IP Webcam (Android) exposes the phone's camera as an MJPEG/RTSP URL on your local network. You then add that URL to any VMS as if it were an IP camera — typically something like http://<phone-ip>:8080/video or rtsp://<phone-ip>:<port>/….

For most casual setups the streaming-source route is the one that fits the title of this article: it gives you a real network stream straight from the phone in your pocket.

A caveat on terminology: if you simply google "video surveillance app", most of what you'll find is client apps — they connect to a full surveillance server (which you typically run on a desktop PC) and are just a remote viewer, so they don't use the phone's own camera at all. Similarly, network-camera manufacturers often tell you to "download our app", but that app controls their IP camera rather than turning your phone into one.

2. Use a laptop webcam (or a standalone USB one)

Built-in laptop/monitor webcams and standalone USB webcams are UVC devices, and some surveillance software can use them directly — with a few caveats (a USB cable is short and tethers the camera to the computer, you usually get one per port, and resolution/frame-rate are whatever the webcam offers; they're great for testing, less so as a permanent outdoor camera).

Where it's supported, a USB webcam is detected in a VMS simply as a USB camera: when you launch the program or add a camera, it shows up in the device list and you just pick it.

A Speedlink USB webcam detected as a USB camera in Xeoma's + list.

That covers the case where the surveillance software runs on the same machine as the webcam. If your VMS only accepts IP cameras, or you want to process the webcam on a different computer, you can re-publish the webcam over the network as an RTSP stream — the same "emulate a network camera" idea we use for video files below.

3. Use a video file as a camera

A recorded clip is a brilliant test source: you can replay the exact same footage as many times as you like, which is perfect for trying out detectors and analytics (recreate a "fall", a fire, a plate appearing — in seconds, without staging anything in real life).

The catch: most VMS won't let you just add a video file as a source*. Instead you have to emulate a network stream from the file, so the software thinks it's a camera. And it's worth being honest — not every VMS will accept even an emulated camera; some are quite inflexible about sources. But where it works, here are two ways to do it.

*Xeoma is an exception here — it can work with a video file directly as a source, without you having to emulate a stream first. More on that in Option B.

Option A — Emulate an RTSP stream with VLC

VLC can stream a local file out over RTSP:

1. Media → Stream… (Ctrl+S).

2. On the File tab, click Add…, choose your video, then click Stream.

3. In the wizard, click Next.

4. Under New destination, pick RTSP and click Add.

5. Set the Port (default 8554) and a Path, e.g. /stream.

6. (Optional) tick Activate Transcoding and choose an H.264 profile, in case your VMS doesn't like the original codec.

7. Click Next, then Stream.

8. In your VMS, add the camera by URL: rtsp://<PC-IP>:8554/stream.

To make it loop, just enable repeat in VLC's own interface — turn on the Loop button in the playback controls (the looping-arrows icon at the bottom of the player) so the file replays continuously.

Option B — Use Xeoma

There are two reasons Xeoma is handy here. First, you can simply run your surveillance in Xeoma directly — it can take a video file as a source without the emulation dance. Second, even if you intend to use a different brand of VMS, Xeoma can act as the bridge that turns your file into a network stream for it.

For that, the file needs to be in genuine MJPEG format, and the cleanest way to convert it is with ffmpeg which you can download freely from the official website. Besides, it can also be found inside Xeoma's folder, so you can use it from there. Open a command line or Terminal and drag the ffmpeg file to the window. Follow it by an -i and drag your source video file into the same window. Next, input some preferences for conversion and the name for the output file. Something like this:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -an -b:v 2000K -f fsmjpeg output.mjpeg

Then:

In Xeoma, go to + menu, select 'Add a new camera manually' and then remove the first module - Universal Camera - from the workflow. Instead, add a File Reading from the top bar and enter its settings. Once inside that dialog, point it at output.mjpeg (the video-file source).

Adding a video file as a source in Xeoma.

To feed that stream into another VMS, attach an "RTSP Broadcasting" module to the file's chain instead of other filters or destinations — Xeoma will publish it as an RTSP stream you can add elsewhere by URL.

The "RTSP Broadcasting" module attached in a Xeoma chain.

See the RTSP link in the RSTP Broadcasting module's settings

Conclusion

That's three practical ways to get a working camera stream without owning a network camera — a phone, a USB webcam, or a plain video file. And they're not the only stand-ins: you can also use a smart-TV camera, a photo or action camera (over USB webcam mode or an HDMI capture stick), public cameras published by their owners, or even a screen-capture of whatever is playing on your display. We covered all of these in the full list of 9 alternatives.

Once you've used these to test the waters and you're convinced, do consider investing in proper network cameras — they're inexpensive, simple, and purpose-built for surveillance. But until then, there's nothing stopping you from getting a real system up and running with the gear you already have.

Did you enjoy the article? Have questions or ideas for future guides? Let us know in the comments!