Thanks to Steve / Question on a crappy camera work-around

Hi All,

I wanted to second some of the comments about Netcam Studio. I appreciate that when some bugs were found recently Steve fixed them and released an updated version quickly. This type of response makes me look at purchasing a license and making Netcam Studio my final solution.

My only remaining issue is not related to a bug in the software at all, but more about if there is a work-around for a crappy camera. I have four PoE cameras and one WiFi. All have motion detection enabled and it works great. The WiFi camera has a weird issue where occasionally the entire image will shift to the right and then back to the left. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does its like the pixels all shift to the right by X number of pixels and then back to the left. Unfortunately this causes a trigger of the motion. Is there a creative way that I might work around this problem and not have the false alarms? Would increasing the frame interval from 300ms to longer work? If so, could that negatively impact motion detection?

Thank you in advance for any help or thoughts anyone may have!

Regards,
Brian

If you manage please send a screenshot of the visual problem that you have.

If it’s decoding artefacts they can occur from time to time in the following cases:

  1. Bad Wifi
  2. CPU to high

And may happen very often when using UDP mode instead of TCP mode (because packets may arrive in wrong order to the decoder)

But maybe it’s not artefacts that you have.

In case it’s related to 1/2 then what usually helps is playing with the camera settings (in the camera UI, not in NCS) to either reduce resolution, reduce fps or just tweak a bit the compressions settings (usually the best quality will use more power / bandwidth)

Hi Steve!

Thanks for responding! Here’s a screenshot of the alert as it came in to my e-mail. I’ve never witnessed what would appear to be decoding artifacts with these alerts.

It could be WiFi, but I’m using Ubiquiti antennas and have devices further away than this camera that seem to work, but as the devices are different it’s a possibility. My CPU is running about 15% from Netcam Studio, 20% total.

Regarding TCP or UDP, I’m not sure. The link to the video is MJPEG: http://username:password@IP ADDRESS:80/video.cgi?resolution=VGA

The camera is a D-Link DCS-932LB so perhaps there is another link to the video that would work better? I also have it set to 15 FPS so maybe turning it down might address the WiFi possibility?

I’ll try slowing the frame rate down and seeing if it has an adjustment for quality in the MJPEG stream.

Thanks for your help Steve!

Regards,
Brian

P.S. In the above screenshot I noticed that the FPS was 10, but sometimes it is as high as 15.

No these are not artefacts. Artefacts can happen in MPEG4/RTSP

Here it looks more like MJPEG parsing issue or something.

Do you have any warning about this in NCS logs ?

Strangely enough, no. Nothing for that IP address in the logs. My PoE cameras disconnect often though, I just learned. Ha.

Maybe try to see if by opening this mjpeg stream with VLC you experience the same (in which case we probably can’t do much).

Otherwise would be interesting to dump this stream (2-3MB of it) to a file so that we can analyze it.

Steve, thanks for offering to help to that level, especially for an unlicensed user! Unfortunately this video problem is so intermittent it would be difficult to capture any of it. One night over the weekend I got 30+ alerts overnight, and then 3 the next. It’s really hit or miss. I’ll try the slower frame rate and on a night it gets really bad maybe watch VLC and see if it occurs.

Thank you again for your help!