ODM finds the ONVIF cameras on your network and lets you watch and configure them: live video, video encoder settings, imaging, network, users, PTZ, events and more. It was written by Synesis and last released as version 2.2.250 (SourceForge), at a time when cameras streamed H.264. It can't play the H.265 streams most cameras use today.
This is that ODM, brought up to date:
- H.265 video. The player was rewritten on a current FFmpeg (7.0.1), which receives the camera's RTSP stream (UDP, TCP or tunneled through HTTP) and decodes H.265, H.264, MJPEG and MPEG-4. The old live555 library and the 2013 FFmpeg are gone.
- What's playing, on the video. The codec and size of the stream, as the
decoder sees it (for example
H.265 2560x1440), at the top right of the video. - Full screen. Double-click the video, or press F11, to fill the screen with it; Esc, F11 or another double-click goes back.
- Reconnects by itself. When a camera stops sending video for 10 seconds (it rebooted, dropped off Wi-Fi, or ended the session), the video shows NO SIGNAL and ODM opens the stream again: after 2 seconds, then 4, 8, 16, 32, and every 60 seconds after that until the camera is back. It stops trying if the camera refuses the login, so as not to lock the account.
- A log of dropouts. Each stream's dropouts and reconnects are written,
one line each, to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Onvif Device Manager\logs\player.log, so you can tell a camera that keeps restarting (it stops answering) from a network hiccup (it answers at once). No passwords are written to it. - Ignores bad camera addresses. An announced address with port 0 can no
longer replace a camera's working address. Announcements and address changes
are logged to
discovery.log, besideplayer.log. - Better discovery. Some cameras never answer the network-wide discovery probe, only one sent straight to them. After the usual probe, ODM now also probes every address of your local network directly, so those cameras show up too (local networks of up to 1024 addresses).
- Safe encoder settings. ODM talks to cameras through the original ONVIF media service, which has no H.265: H.265 cameras report "H264" there. When the encoding a camera reports isn't what it actually streams, the Video streaming page says so and turns Apply off, instead of sending the camera the wrong encoding. Change such a camera's encoding in its own web page.
- Builds with today's tools: Visual Studio 2019, .NET Framework 4.8, 64-bit.
There are now three ODMs: the original 2.2.250 on SourceForge, which can't play H.265; the Apra Labs fork, which added H.265 in April 2026; and this one. Here is what this one does differently (as of November 2026):
- One video engine, no live555. FFmpeg both receives the RTSP stream and decodes it. The 2013 live555 library isn't patched here, it's gone, so there is less old native code in the program and only one network stack for video.
- Small. The installer is 11 MB; Apra's v3.1.0 installer is 63 MB.
- The newer features are in the release you download. Direct discovery probes, full screen, the codec overlay and reconnecting after a stall were written here first and later contributed to Apra's project, where they were merged into its development branch in October 2026. Apra's latest release (v3.1.0, April 2026) came out before them; here they're in the installer.
- Only here: the port-0 address guard with
discovery.log, the dropout logplayer.log, and settings kept in your user profile instead of the program folder.
Apra's fork has things this one doesn't: HTTPS/TLS and RTSPS cameras, the ONVIF Media2 service (so H.265 cameras are reported as H.265), several saved logins, and a code-signed installer. If you need those, use theirs.
Download ODM-2.4.1-setup.exe from the Releases page and run
it. It needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 with .NET Framework 4.8 (part of Windows
10 since the May 2019 update, and of Windows 11). Everything else, including
FFmpeg and the Visual C++ runtime, comes with it.
The installer isn't code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn about it the first time: choose More info, then Run anyway.
ODM runs as administrator (as the original did: discovery needs it), so Windows asks for permission each time it starts.
If a camera doesn't show up, add it by hand with Add at the bottom of the
device list: its address, e.g. http://192.168.1.20:8080/onvif/device_service.
Visual Studio 2019 (or later, with the v142 tools) with the .NET desktop, C++ desktop, C++/CLI and F# components:
msbuild odm.vc110.sln /m /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64
The program is odm\odm.ui.app\bin\Release\x64\odm.exe. FFmpeg comes prebuilt
in libs/ffmpeg (headers, import libraries and DLLs); to build it yourself
from the FFmpeg 7.0.1 release
see tools/build-ffmpeg.sh.
The installer is made with Inno Setup 6:
iscc installer\odm.iss
tools/rtsp_codec.py shows which codecs a camera's RTSP stream uses (it asks
for the camera's login itself), handy for checking what a camera really sends.
ODM is free software under the GNU General Public License version 2: see LICENSE. The original ODM is © Synesis 2010-2013; the H.265 update and the other changes here are under the same license.
It includes FFmpeg 7.0.1, built as LGPL 2.1 or later (see libs/ffmpeg/COPYING.LGPLv2.1; the build configuration is in tools/build-ffmpeg.sh), FSharp.Core (MIT), Reactive Extensions (Apache 2.0), Prism, Unity and the WPF Toolkit (Ms-PL), and the Bouncy Castle C# crypto library (MIT).