VISCA over IP

showstack / protocols / visca-over-ip

Also called VISCA/IP, Sony VISCA over IP, VISCA.

Sony's VISCA camera control commands wrapped in an eight byte header and sent over UDP. It is the usual way to drive PTZ cameras (pan, tilt, zoom, focus, iris, presets) from a controller, a switcher or a show control system.

Video controlProprietary, documentedSonyVerified

Control Small, urgent, must arrive

Small messages that either repeat constantly or fire once. Bandwidth is almost never the problem.

What kills it. Latency and loss on the messages that fire once. A repeating level survives a dropped packet; a GO does not.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

Ports

udp/52381 Sony VISCA over IP commands, inquiries and replies
This is Sony's documented port. Many third party cameras instead expose raw serial VISCA on a TCP socket at a vendor-chosen port with no header at all, which is a different protocol wearing the same name.

udp/52380 Network setup commands (IP configuration and discovery)
Documented on Sony's ILME-FR7. Not present on every camera that speaks VISCA over IP.

What goes wrong

The header carries a sequence number that the camera echoes back. Restart the controller or power-cycle the camera and the two disagree, so you get error replies until a reset control command re-syncs the counter.

Sony state plainly that UDP delivery is not guaranteed and that retransmission is the application's job. A dropped preset recall does not error, it simply does not happen.

Two controllers on one camera fight over the sequence number stream. Give each camera one owner, or put a proxy in front of it, before you add a second control surface.

"VISCA over IP" on a non-Sony camera often means raw VISCA bytes on a TCP socket with no eight byte header and no sequence number. Find out which one the camera wants before blaming the network.

Payload type distinguishes command (0x0100) from inquiry (0x0110). Sending an inquiry with a command payload type gets you a silent no-op on some cameras and an error on others.

What speaks VISCA over IP (1)

Product	Direction	Notes
Crestron CP4N Control System Crestron	out	Camera control.

Open source implementations

libvisca-ip — C, LGPL-2.1-or-later

Typical use

PTZ camera control from a hardware joystick controller over the house network
Preset recall driven from cues in a show control or streaming system
Multi-camera control from a single operator position
Camera control travelling on the same network as the video feed

Sources

Sony HD Color Video Camera Command List Version 2.20 (BRC-H900) — VISCA over IP, port 52381 — Sony Corporation primary
Sony Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera VISCA Command List v2.00 (ILME-FR7, ports 52381 and 52380) — Sony Corporation primary
libvisca-ip — libvisca with TCP and UDP connection — Norihiro Kamae

Understand the mechanism

How software talks to software Node graphs and game engines

Something wrong, or missing?

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