ONVIF stands for Open Network Video Interface Forum. It's an open industry standard that provides interoperability among IP security devices such as security cameras, video recorders, software, and access control systems.

Designed specifically to overcome the challenges in multi-vendor environments, ONVIF’s common interfaces facilitate communication between technologies from different manufacturers and allows system components to be used interchangeably, provided they conform to the ONVIF specification.

You can check the ONVIF member list to see all the members and search for conformant products.

Specification

The ONVIF Core Specification aims to standardize the network interface (on the network layer) of network video products. It defines a network video communication framework based on relevant IETF and Web Services standards including security and IP configuration requirements. ONVIF utilizes IT industry technologies including SOAP, RTP, and Motion JPEG, MPEG-4, and H.264 video codecs. Later releases of the ONVIF specification (version 2.0) also cover storage and additional aspects of analytics.

Conformance to ONVIF profiles

ONVIF profiles make it easy to recognize how ONVIF conformant devices and clients are compatible with one another. An ONVIF profile has a fixed set of features that must be supported by a conformant device and client. It ensures that a client that conforms to Profile S, for example, will work with a device that also conforms to Profile S. Clients and devices can support more than one ONVIF profile; for instance, a network camera with local storage can conform to both Profile S and G.

Conformance to profiles is the only way that ensures compatibility between ONVIF conformant products; therefore, only registered products with conformance to a profile are considered to be ONVIF conformant.

Profile S, G, Q and T are relevant for video systems. Profile C and A are relevant for access control systems.