I recently picked up a Zmodo security DVR system off of Woot, and while it works a well as I could expect given the camera quality and price point. Unfortunately since it doesn't support my HA system or Windows Phone (both reasonable deficiencies) OOTB it was more novel toy than useful tool. It's not my style to accept these sorts of things so I contacted Zmodo and offered to write tools to make it work in both scenarios then asked nicely for the specifics on how to interact with the device. Let's just say that didn't go as planned.

Frankly, this kind of shortsighted behavior from hardware OEMs baffles me. They make their money from hardware sales, giving away the software clients to make it useful enough for end-users to get the value proposition. When someone offers to make your platform more valuable, for free, the correct response is not to tell them to shove off (even politely). Ultimately, all this does is slow down the motivated, making it more expensive (in time) to get it working.

I know this is rambling, but as the title foreshadowed it got done - just took longer than it should have.

ZmodoServer is a Widows service that connects on-demand to the mobile h.264 stream exposed by the DVR creates a JPEG (or MJPEG) exposed via HTTP. By default it is setup to work with LAV Video (not included) but any H.264 decoder that accepts MEDIASUBTYPE_H264 and exposes MEDIASUBTYPE_RGB24 or MEDIASUBTYPE_RGB32 should work (I use ArcSoft's).