How do I find the video stream URL of my security DVR by myself?

After even deeper Googling and some lucky guesses, I have found that the DVR in question does not use RTSP or HTTP, or any URL for that matter. It connects to IP:port and gets some proprietary video stream from it. Many other cheap DVRs that work with vMEye do this as well, such as Zmodo and Swann.

HOWEVER, someone has managed to reverse-engineer it for an Android app, and someone else asked for permission to make a C program that decodes the video stream and outputs it as a pipe. It's not perfectly reliable, but here it is: http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18137

But the guy made it for Zoneminder machines to connect to. I have yet to figure out how to make VLC or SecuritySpy open the pipe on my Mac or in Debian (just because I'm new to pipes and video streams), but it should be possible.

An easy way to find the URL is to look at the regular web interface's source code, specifically the video element. My Elec web interface uses Quicktime and it passes the RTSP address in the following format:

rtsp://192.168.X.X:554/user=YOUR_USERNAME&password=YOUR_PASSWORD&channel=1&stream=0.sdp?real_stream--rtp-caching=100

Cams are selected through the channel variable. The rtsp port might be configurable in your DVR and as such differ.

If your camera is ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) compatible, then the open source ONVIF Device Manager might help:

ONVIF Device Manager is a Network Video Client (NVC) to manage Network Video Transmitters (NVT), Network Video Storage (NVS) and Network Video Analytics (NVA) devices. Implements Discovery, Device, Media, Imaging, Analytics, Events and PTZ services.

I'm also an unlucky owner of a cheap IP-camera (SAF IP-300). It provides absolutely useless and buggy web interface, which "works" in IE only. I was fortunate to find ONVIF Device Manager and it discovered my camera and showed me the URL rtsp://ip-of-my-camera/live0.264 which I was able to open in VLC.

I can't guaranty that your camera is ONVIF compatible, so this method may not work for you. Unfortunately, SAF IP-300 is so unstable piece of hardware that it can't deliver a continuous stream for more than a 3 minutes.