For a while, I used an ftp connection to download videos from my geovision camera (model GV-MFD520, I use it for home surveillance). But due to often power outages in place where I live, I had constantly repeating problems with the sd card which was used as an intermediary between camera and linux-powered station. It made me to look for other solutions. I switched to RTSP protocol and now it works flawless.
If you got geovision camera and you’re building your own recording station, you might find that draft helpful. First of all, you have to enable RTSP server in your camera’s panel. Then you can for example use VLC to check if it works properly.
In my case proper address of stream was: rtsp://192.168.1.73:8554/CH001.sdp. I used cron to execute script with such line every 10 minutes:
avconv -i rtsp://192.168.1.73:8554/CH001.sdp -c copy -t 610 /mnt/videos/$(date "+%d-%m-%Y-%H:%M:%S").mp4
Where 610 is for the time (610 seconds). Extra 10 seconds are just in case, sometimes first 3-5 seconds are broken. I also configured nginx to list directory with these videos. Modern browsers are capable of playing this out of box.