Dallmeier electronic GmbH & Co.KG
The Dallmeier electronic GmbH & Co KG - hereinafter referred to as Dallmeier for short - is a leading German company in the field of video surveillance technology. In its plus 35-year history, the company has developed a state-of-the-art, integrated portfolio of surveillance cameras, recording systems and video management software. The focus is on quality "Made in Germany", cyber security and data protection.
As a global player with local roots, Dallmeier attaches great importance to a high level of vertical integration in research, development and production. All key components are developed and manufactured in Regensburg. The lion's share of the components supplied is sourced from within a radius of less than 200 km.
Dallmeier approached basysKom GmbH and imago Design GmbH with the following request: the development of a "mobile-first" video management software for professional use. The app should work both standalone with edge recording on the camera and in combination with other recording solutions from Dallmeier. The focus of the development was on a modern, innovative UX/UI and video streaming in the highest possible quality. Ease of commissioning and use were important. This means that although the vast majority of recorders and camera systems are operated in private networks, behind a NAT or a firewall, the solution must work without a VPN. The benchmark for commissioning were apps from consumer devices. On the other hand, there were high demands on data security. Image data in particular must be encrypted end-to-end. Comprehensive site-, rights- and user-management are essential for professional use.
Our task was to design the architecture (from the device, to the cloud, to the app), implement the app for Android and iOS, as well as the necessary cloud infrastructure. We were also responsible for parts of the embedded Linux firmware used to connect the established video functionality to the cloud.
WebRTC is used as the basic technology for the architecture. WebRTC as a standard was originally developed to enable peer-to-peer video conferencing applications directly in the web browser, but is now also widely used elsewhere. WebRTC covers topics such as the discovery of connection paths between mobile app and video device, the negotiation of codecs, the encryption of media data and video streaming itself. For us the use of WebRTC eliminates the need for a VPN.
The mobile backend was implemented with Microsoft Azure. The app interacts with the backend via a REST API (implemented in Typescript/NestJs). Device communication (device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device) takes place via Azure IOT Hub. Azure is also used for camera and recorder enrollment (DPS), user management (AD B2C), data storage (BlobStorage and MS SQL) and event routing. ARM templates (Azure Resource Manager) were written for the deployment of various cloud environments.
The app for Android and iOS was implemented using Flutter. UX/UI and technical feasibility were developed and implemented in close coordination with Dallmeier and imago Design in an agile process.
Highlights
- State-of-the-art cross-platform Flutter app for Android and iO
- High-quality video streaming (h.264/h.265)
- Support for multiple parallel video streams
- Interactive event search in the video
- Push notifications for events detected by cameras
- Talk-back
