What Is ONVIF?

ONVIF, the Open Network Video Interface Forum, is an industry body and the open standard it publishes for IP-based security products. It was founded in 2008 by Axis Communications, Bosch Security Systems and Sony, and today has hundreds of member companies making cameras, recorders, access control and software.

Without a shared standard, every camera brand would need its own integration in every recorder and every video management system. ONVIF replaces that with one common set of network commands for discovery, video streaming, camera control, events and recording. A recorder that speaks ONVIF can add a camera it has never seen before, start its video and receive its motion alarms, as long as both sides support the same parts of the standard.

Those parts are grouped into profiles. So the useful question is not whether a device is ONVIF compatible, but which profiles it is conformant with, and whether the recorder supports the same ones.

ONVIF builds on standard IT protocols rather than inventing new ones. Devices announce themselves with WS-Discovery, so a recorder can find every ONVIF camera on the local network. Configuration and control use web services over HTTP: the recorder asks the camera what it can do, sets the resolution and codec, moves a PTZ head or subscribes to events. The video itself flows over RTSP and RTP, the same protocols most IP cameras already use.

Because the commands are standard, the same request works whichever brand made the camera. The camera still decides how good the image, the compression and the analytics are. ONVIF only defines how other products talk to it.

ONVIF’s specifications are published openly, so any developer can read them. Membership is needed to test products with ONVIF’s tools and to claim conformance with a profile.

Each profile is a fixed set of features that a product must support to claim conformance. The video profiles are the ones that matter for cameras and NVRs.

Profile S is the oldest and most widely supported. Profile T added H.265 and better event handling, so it is the profile to look for on current cameras. Profile M matters for AI systems, because it lets a camera or analytics server send what it has detected, not just the video.

ONVIF lets one recorder take cameras from several makers, as long as both sides list the same profiles. That matters in industrial and transport projects, where cameras are chosen for each location, such as an explosion-protected camera in one area and a thermal camera on a perimeter, rather than all from one catalogue. It also matters over the life of a system: stations, depots and plants often run their video systems for ten years or more, and ONVIF means a failed camera can be replaced with a current model from another maker without changing the recorder. Our guide to PoE in surveillance and NVR systems covers the wider set-up, and our NVR FAQ explains the recorder.

For AI, ONVIF is usually how an edge computer finds cameras and pulls their streams before running its own models. Profile M then lets results flow back to the VMS as metadata, so video analytics events appear alongside the video. Our industrial NVRs record and analyse ONVIF camera feeds, and our industrial PoE switches power and connect the cameras.

We supply industrial NVRs and edge AI computers configured for the project’s ONVIF cameras as standard, with streams, recording and analytics validated before the system ships.