If you ever come across an IP camera in your development endeavors, and would like to write code either to retrieve a video stream from it, manage it, or alternatively configure it, you would be happy to find out that it likely supports the ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) protocol, giving you a standardized API to work with, as well as open source libraries to use in a number of languages. You will also see that it is a well documented, relatively easy to understand protocol.
You will be less happy to find out that as the protocol is quite old, there is little active interest around it in the open source community, many libraries not frequently being updated, not documented, requiring to review protocol specs to understand how to perform a task, and that some of the features you need, your specific camera does not fully support, or behaves not as expected.
Then you will find out that ONVIF is a SOAP based protocol, with all the nauseousness involved, which makes sense as it dates back to the time when developers thought SOAP is promising.