Rotating ONVIF Streams on Axis Cameras with Firmware >= 9.X

Issue

When recording video from Axis cameras with newer firmwares (>= 9.x), changing the camera orientation or rotation in the Axis Web UI does not rotate the camera in Orchid Core VMS.

Note: Some Axis cameras have a workaround for this issue in the "Plain config" section. See this article for more details.

Cause

Newer Axis cameras have decoupled the rotation settings available in the Axis camera web UI from the rotation settings used for ONVIF video streams.  With these cameras, the web UI rotation setting only affects the rotation of streams accessed using Axis's proprietary VAPIX protocol, rather than the standards-based ONVIF protocol used by Orchid Core VMS.  Rotating ONVIF streams now requires a different configuration setting.  Future versions of Orchid Core VMS will automate this configuration, but for now the setting change must be made manually as described below.

Solution

The rotation setting for ONVIF video streams must be set in a text file that resides in each camera's flash memory.  You will need to use SSH to update this file by following the procedure below:

1. Access the camera's web UI by navigating to the camera's IP address using a web browser.
2. After providing administrator credentials, access the camera Settings dialog:
   
   
   
3. From the Settings dialog navigate to System > Plain config.  It may be necessary to use the paging arrows to find the Plain config link:
   
   
   
4. Within the Plain config dialog, navigate to Network and scroll down to the SSH section.  Check the box "SSH Enabled" and click "Save" at the bottom of the page.
   
5. Next, connect to the camera using an SSH client.  On Windows, PuTTY is a popular and free SSH client, on Linux, you can use the ssh command from a terminal, e.g.:
       ssh root@{camera-ip-address}
   
   In either case, log in as the "root" user and provide the root password for the camera.
   
   
6. Now that you're connected via SSH, execute the following command to update the rotation setting for all ONVIF streams on this camera (copy-and-paste this command into your SSH session to insure it is correct):
   
   sed -i 's/^Rotation=.*$/Rotation=180/g' /etc/ws/onvif/media/media.conf ; reboot
   
   The above command will update all streams to be rotated 180 degrees (i.e., flipped vertically).  You can replace the value 180 with either 0, 90, or 270 to set different rotations.  After you run the above command, the camera will automatically reboot so that the settings may take effect.
   
   
7. After the camera has rebooted, Orchid will automatically reconnect to its configured ONVIF stream.  It may take several minutes for Orchid's thumbnails to reflect the new rotations setting -- view live video from the camera stream on the Orchid stage to verify that the rotation is now correct.