How to access your Panasonic BL-C131A from the internet
21 Jun
This is the coolest part of owning a BL-C131A! You could be in the other end of the world and yet get a live stream from your net cam! You can even pan and tilt the camera remotely! You can even do this with a Blackberry or an iPhone (or any phone that supports html).
I initially resisted writing a howto for this, but looking at the number of queries, one might be in order! I have to admit, the documentation from Panasonic is extremely confusing! If you are not a network guy, you could get confused. Ip4, Ip6, UPnP..!
So let’s get started! I’m assuming at this point you already have the camera setup and working from your local area network (home). If not, check out my previous post.
- Goto Setup..UPnP and disable UPnP. I know this is not what Panasonic recommends. But trust me, enabling UPnP is not wise. There is a reason this is disabled in all routers by default.
- Goto Setup..DynamicDNS, select Viewnetcam.com
- Select the Internet tab and disable Auto Port Forwarding and set ‘Allow Access from the Internet (IPv6) to No. Again, this might seem counter intuitive, but IPv6 is not used widely yet. Select ‘Register with Viewnetcam.com’ and register. Pick an easy to remember domain name and register with viewnetcam.com. Remember the password and url. It will be of the format: <the name you selected>.viewnetam.com. You will need this url to access your camera remotely.
- Now, open your router’s admin page. Of course unless you are using Tomato, your screen will look a lot different than what’s shown here, but all routers will have an option for port forwarding. Look for it and enter TCP for the protocol, 80 for Port and your camera’s IP address. Description can be anything or blank. Save. Some routers might require a restart. In the screenshot below ignore the lines above the last line. Those are specific to my setup and not relevant to this post.
- Now open Firefox and goto the url you setup at viewnetcam.com. You should be able to see live images from your camera! This will work from anywhere where there is internet connection. Try the pan and tilt, it is very cool!
- If you have an iPhone or Blackberry, use this url instead: http://<your>viewnetcom.com/mobile
The above url is a specialized mobile version. You can pan and tilt on your iPhone or Blackberry.
That’s all folks! Let me know if you have any questions. I’ll be happy to help.
Nope, you don’t need to disable anything. Please try the following setup:
1– setup the camera with manual ip (ip 192.168.0.200)
2– in your router, setup forwarding (web server port 80) to 192.168.0.200
3– test access to your camera locally http://192.168.0.200
4– access http://www.whatismyip.com/ to check your public ip address
5– go to another pc in another network or ask a friend to access http://yourpublicip (where yourpublicip is the ip you see in http://www.whatismyip.com/
this must work. let me know the progress.
This isn’t exactly streaming, I’m just getting static images and have to refresh my blackberry browser constantly. Is this what you get as well?
I don’t see streaming either…
Thank you sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much for posting this.
I played around with this camera for 2 hours until I found your website. I reset my router and my camera. Followed your instructions step by step and 10 minutes later, it’s working.