I’ve installed a bunch of the Alarm.com ADC cameras. In the alarm.com account there is information on port forwarding to allow direct access to the cameras. It’s not allowing it and when I asked Alarm.com they said it’s not possible. So I am trying to understand wy all the relevant information is published on the user portal.
See screen cap which clearly talks about using port forwarding which is NOT required for the camera to work with the alarm.com app. it’s not setup on any of them right now except one as a test and they are all working fine through the app.
I’m speculating because they don’t talk about the internal details of how it all works but this is my guess…
Port forwarding to Alarm.com cameras is not for the purpose of a user connecting directly with a web browser or IP cam software. It’s for the Alarm.com app or web page to connect to the camera and get a video stream when you are viewing through the app or user website. In the vast majority of cases, manual port forwarding through the router is not needed because we’re usually dealing with SOHO routers in which case Alarm.com can use automatic NAT traversal methods such as hole punching or UPnP to get through the router/firewall.
In the rare case that your camera is on a private network using NAT and these automatic NAT traversal methods won’t work then you can give the camera a private static IP address and use manual port forwarding to give Alarm.com a way to access the camera. These days this would probably only happen in certain commercial installations that use NAT and also have higher grade firewalls or a more complex network topology than a SOHO network.
