How to access camera feed of Raspberry Pi out of a local broadband network?

Question

BACKGROUND

The current setup I have for the Raspberry Pi is:

USB Webcam -> Raspberry Pi -> Netgear Router -> Local ISP -> Internet

My ISP gives me a captive portal through which I can login to access the internet and my public IP address is shown something like 203.xxx.xx.xx, when I try to access this IP from the browser, I am taken to the ISP's Captive Portal Page and not allowed to access anything further.

There are many other people connected to the same ISP and they are given the same IP too (obviously).

The ISP is not ready to allot a dedicated IP or open up any ports for me so that I can configure my Netgear router to forward ports etc.

Question

I have installed motion on my Pi and I can access it via 192.168.1.3:8080 via my local lan i.e inside my Netgear Router Network. How can I access from outside my Network i.e from a remote location like my office.

I would not like to use third party software like teamviewer to relay my whole Pi system over the internet.

Is there any way I can upload the stream to a cloud server efficiently and then access it?

Answer 1

The problem you're trying to solve is called NAT traversal, where you're trying to communicate with another device while using carrier-grade NAT.

Potentially, you could proxy all of your packets through a server, using a protocol like SOCKS. This probably won't scale exceptionally well, but if you don't plan to have too many clients, it's probably acceptable. You will, of course, have to pay for or run a server outside your network (not inside a NAT), which may be slightly complex/inconvenient.

Alternatively, you could punch a hole through the router and communicate between your two intended clients directly. According to Wikipedia, "VoIP products, online gaming applications, and P2P networking software all use hole punching." If your use case is similar to that, it may be worth considering.

You may also find this question on Super User relevant, with an answer by spacecrab:

Yes, option: purchase access with a VPN service that allows for a static IP and port forwarding, you will be able to have clients talk directly to your device(s) as you'd expect.

Option two: Find a deal on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and configure a popular VPN software like OpenVPN yourself. End result is the same, configuration part is much more in-depth. Good learning experience if you're trying to find a reason to spend an afternoon educating yourself on light networking.

Answer 2

I wonder if another solution would be to have your Raspberry Pi PUSH the feed out to a cloud server.

The other answer provides the best possible way to get INTO your pi from outside, but if you don't need to do that, if you just want occasional security camera-style images, you could script something that would watch a folder, and when a new image appears, upload that to a remote location. If you want the full feed, you could stream to something like youtube, keep the feed private, and then go there whenever you want to.

Here's steps for the youtube process:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/live-stream-youtube-raspberry-pi/

Here's how to automatically upload a folder:

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/12495/is-auto-upload-possible

Answer 3

A lot of ISP providers do not allow residential customers to use port 80 or 8080. Try using a different port number with Motion, and also check with your ISP to see which ports are allowed. You also need to activate port forwarding on the Netgear router, so traffic is routed to the Raspberry Pi