VAPIX mDNS service

The mDNS-SD (multicast DNS – Service Discovery) protocol is used to discover and advertise different types of services available on a network.

• The previous Axis services exposed by mDNS had limitations, such as not indicating which entry point was available and indicating support for access over both HTTP and HTTPS.
• Adding these new VAPIX services enables discovering devices that has VAPIX support and a way to know how to interact with them.
• The discovered service contains information about which entry point the device exposes (parameter API / API discovery / ...), the serial number of the device, and which HTTP/HTTPS port that should be used to interact with it.

The old mDNS services exposed by Axis products (_axis-video._tcp/_axis-nvr._tcp/_axis-…) will be deprecated in an upcoming AXIS OS LTS branch. This will be communicated separately at a later date, as timing is subject to change as work progresses.

• The new service will be added to the 11.4 release of AXIS OS. Updated devices will support the new service. Devices which are not updated to AXIS OS 11.4 or later will not support the new service and users will need to use the old way of detecting devices to find them.
• To comply with the mDNS-SD IETF RFC 6763, the instance name (also known as friendly name) format have changed and the instance name used for the legacy Axis mDNS services will not be used for the new one. The old format was: ”AXIS - ”, and the new one will omit the serial number, giving it ”AXIS .
• The new format of the instance name is less unique on the network and any duplicates will be enumerated by the protocol, i.e. suffixing “(2)”,”(3)”, to the instance name. If the instance name is supposed to be used, it is encouraged to give it a more descriptive name.

• AXIS OS portal