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ONVIF is a global and open industry forum with the goal of facilitating the development and use of a global open standard for the interface of physical IP-based security products - or, in other words, to create a standard for how IP products within video surveillance and other physical security areas can communicate with each other. ONVIF is an organization started in 2008 by Axis Communications, Bosch Security Systems and Sony.
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It was officially incorporated as a non-profit, 501(c)6 Delaware corporation on November 25, 2008. ONVIF membership is open to manufacturers, software developers, consultants, system integrators, end users and other interest groups that wish to participate in the activities of ONVIF. The ONVIF specification aims to achieve interoperability between network video products regardless of manufacturer.
The cornerstones of ONVIF are:
Members
ONVIF offers three levels of membership: user, contributing, and full member, to accommodate individual choices of participation. Full or contributing members can actively influence the development of the standard by participating in the work of the forum. The user member level is open to organizations that wish to use the network interface specification and have access to specification proposals but do not want to participate in any work of the forum. Technology and test tools are available to all ONVIF members to facilitate the development of conformant products.
In December 2009, ONVIF’s member base had grown to 103 members. This comprised 12 full members, 13 contributing members and 78 user members. In December 2010, the forum had more than 240 members and more than 440 conformant products on the market. By January 2015, this had grown to more than 3,700 ONVIF conformant products and 500 members.
Name
ONVIF originally was an acronym for Open Network Video Interface Forum. The longer name was dropped as the scope of the standard expanded beyond video applications.
Benefit of an open standard
ONVIF states that the benefits of an open standard include:
Specification
The ONVIF Core Specification aims to standardize the network interface (on the network layer) of network video products. It defines a network video communication framework based on relevant IETF and Web Services standards including security and IP configuration requirements. The following areas are covered by the Core Specification version 1.0:
ONVIF utilizes IT industry technologies including SOAP, RTP, and Motion JPEG, MPEG-4, and H.264 video codecs. Later releases of the ONVIF specification (version 2.0) also covers storage and additional aspects of analytics.
Profiles
Building on ONVIF Specifications, ONVIF Profiles are collections specifications that guarantee the interoperability of specific features between conformant devices.