Vantage: RTSP ONVIF Camera

Turn an old iPhone into a security camera. That spare phone in your drawer has a better camera than most you can buy. Vantage turns it into a real IP camera your recorder can find, view and record — no cloud, no account, nothing leaves your network. It can keep the footage itself, so you need no recorder at all — or feed one you have. Vantage speaks the two standards recorders use: RTSP for video, ONVIF for setup. If your system takes third-party ONVIF cameras, it treats the phone like any other camera. WORKS WITH • UniFi Protect — tested end to end, streaming and recording • Home Assistant, VLC, ffmpeg • Any recorder taking a third-party ONVIF or RTSP camera — Frigate, Scrypted, Synology Surveillance Station, Blue Iris, Shinobi WHAT YOU GET • Record on the phone itself, no recorder needed. Five-minute clips to scrub, play back and export, oldest deleted automatically. Free keeps an hour; Pro as much as fits. • H.264 from every lens — ultra-wide, wide, telephoto, front. Free streams up to 640×480, at any frame rate the lens offers. • Rotation, mirroring and exposure — auto, locked, or manual ISO and shutter — so a mounted camera can fix its own picture. • Motion detection, free: the phone tells your recorder when it sees movement, as a standard ONVIF event it can act on. • A torch you can switch on from anywhere on your network. • A web control page: open the phone's address in any browser to change the same settings, with a live picture and the clips. • A local JSON API and a snapshot any dashboard can fetch. • It tells you when it stops. If filming stops, the picture freezes or recording fails, the phone posts a notification — on that phone, as there is no cloud to alert anything else. • Nothing collected: no analytics, no account, no cloud. Video never leaves your network. VANTAGE PRO — buy once, or subscribe monthly • HD and beyond: 720p, 1080p, up to 4K and custom formats — 4K runs the phone much hotter • Automatic night light: the torch comes on when something moves in the dark • Audio in the stream, plus two-way talk through the phone's speaker from a client using the ONVIF backchannel • A flat JSON endpoint built for Home Assistant • More than one viewer at a time — record and watch at once • Keep more than an hour of recordings, up to as much as fits • Hold your chosen quality when the phone gets hot, instead of letting it ease down Pro is a one-month auto-renewing subscription, or a one-time purchase. It renews monthly until cancelled; the price is shown before you buy. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://unknownalientechnologies.github.io/vantage-public/privacy GOOD TO KNOW Vantage must stay in the foreground with the screen on: iOS does not allow camera access from the background. Keep the phone plugged in and mounted, and give it a fixed address on your router — recorders identify cameras by IP. Running a camera continuously makes a phone hot, and sustained heat while charging permanently reduces battery capacity. On a battery that is old, damaged, or not a genuine Apple part, heat can also cause swelling and, uncommonly, smoke or fire. Apple designs iPhone for ambient temperatures of 0 to 35 °C. Mount it somewhere ventilated, out of direct sunlight and away from anything flammable, take the case off if it gets hot while charging, set a charge limit of 80% in Settings › Battery, and do not use a phone whose battery is swollen or damaged. Check it in person monthly. When the phone gets hot Vantage lowers the frame rate, the picture size and the bitrate, and dims the screen; your settings return as it cools. Pro can switch that off. iOS applies its own protections either way. A phone used this way loses battery capacity faster than one in a pocket. Vantage is for general monitoring on your own network. It is not a life-safety or alarm system, and recording can be interrupted by iOS at any time — including for temperature.