Thanks. Yes, I have the per-camera zones selected, and motion sensitivity set appropriately. What I'm asking is for a WHOLE-SYSTEM trigger. i.e. When burglar trips cam0: cam0, cam1, cam2, and cam4 ALL start recording, and continue if any or all of them keep sensing motion. Just for configurability, my scenario could have cam3 only trigger itself and cam0 to start recording. Of course, this is just for example. The object is to give the end-user power to configure a system that will function as he wishes. IMHO, triggering the entire setup to start recording is a good idea. I'm just imagining a break in: burglar takes 15seconds to kick in window and climb in, triggering cam0. He then scurries about the place, moving so fast that the normal setup wouldn't trigger any of the other cameras. But if cam0 has triggered them, we would have a complete record of his movements, and more chance of ID'ing the wanker. :-) Obviously, there are lots of uses for surveillance cameras, so this is just one example. Another might be to have a cute record of your dog wandering around the house every time he comes in the dog-flap (trigger), watch as he b-lines for the bed, and get an alert that cam3 (bed-cam) has just caught rover snuggling in under the covers with his pond-water and carrion-rolled-in self.
I must not have been clear about my "remote access" to the iMac running iCamSource. I have ssh "remote login" access, but I do not have RemoteDesktop running. So, I have full access to the unix level, but no remote GUI.
I was experiencing this "loss of cam1" problem when I was on site, and manually reconfiguring (reinstalling) cam1 was resolving the problem. Oh, and that was with my iPhone on the LAN, so port forwarding should not have been the problem. I guess the best way to solve this would be for me to buy Apple Remote Desktop client, install it here, and figure out how to turn on Sharing/ARD on the remote iMac. Then I could access the GUI, be sure that Firewall and/or Little Snitch and/or iCamSource aren't throwing error dialogs, and manually reconfigure iCamSource. Alas, it's not really worth the $300, or whatever Apple is now charging, to buy the ARD client.
I know that it is *possible* to troubleshoot this remotely, but I've about run out of steam. Fortunately, my Cisco webCam is running along fine, and I can remotely control it's servo-controlled camera to peer around and ensure that at least part of the site is not on fire. :-P
Thanks for all the suggestions. If you want to continue this thrash, I'm game for a few more rounds, but I'm not sure this will be very helpful for your ultimate debugging. Once I am back on site, maybe we can suss out WHY iCamSource keeps losing touch with the FW iSight, but keeps running well with the built-in iMac iSight camera.
Let me know what, if anything, you'd like me to do.
Well, it's not so much the whole program crashing, as it seems to have "lost" it's connection to the firewire iSight camera, and now even a reboot of the whole computer isn't resolving this problem, where it did previously. When I had hands-on I could reconfigure iCamSource, i.e. re-add the iSight firewire camera as the second camera, which would restore the serving of the second camera.
Currently, iCamSource is serving up Cam0 just fine, but Cam1 is just missing, gone, lost, disconnected....
To answer your questions, no, "router auto-config" is in its default position. The instructions said to not mess with it unless things weren't working, and they WERE working initially, and ONE camera is still being served, so it seems like maybe that isn't the problem. No?
uPNP is operational on the router, so that shouldn't be the problem, particularly since the Cam0 is still being served, and I can see it and even hear its audio (which is something else that didn't work when cam1 was operational and the only camera that would send audio).
Static IP, check.
Power problems are unlikely, as the iSight is the only FW400 device on a powered Firewire hub.
I guess what I would like to try is reconfiguring the iCamSource settings. The problem is being remote. I need to do this via the shell, i.e. Terminal.
I have pulled out the current settings using
defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.skjm.icamsource | grep Last | grep ID
I wish I had thought to do this BEFORE, when it was working, to have something to compare with, but it looks like both cameras are configured. Obviously, cam0 is, as I can see (and hear!) it just fine. I'm bemused by cam1's disappearance and utter refusal to come back to life though.
I have tried to edit ~/Preferences/com.skjm.icamsource.plist, but it's not a text file, and even running it through strings, the references to devices are too cryptic to decipher, but it does still at least list both cams, so I'm not sure why it's not serving them.
I have the same, or similar problem. I posted before about three cameras utterly failing, and I thought that two was functional, but now that I'm 2000 miles away I discover that ONLY the built-in isight works. The firewire iSight which WAS working, suddenly stopped sending video, and then iCamSource crashed. I managed to have the machine hard-reset, and both cameras came up for a short while, but then the firewire iSight failed again. I have killed the PS and restarted iCamSource several times. I have rebooted the iMac several times. Every time now iCamSource comes back with ONLY the internal camera served. Of course, that is the camera that faces AWAY from what I want to monitor. sigh.
How can I reconfigure iCamSource via the command line, and maybe get the external camera recognized and served again?
I have run into this before with surveillance and would think this solution could be implemented in iCam fairly easily. Scenario: Cam1: watches the street, lots of movement and shadows all day long which trigger false motion. Cam2: watches the door. only set off when someone actually comes to the door, or occasionally headlights or shadows. Cam3: watches inside. only set off when someone is inside, but would hear doorbell or knocking.
It would be really cool to have iCamSource not motion enable Cam1 at all, and then have some cool logic, or even AI, to watch and listen to Cam2 and Cam3 and record enable ALL Cams for a period of time (again, AI would be useful), if any triggers went off.
Just brainstorming, but I think there is something here. Thanks!
Sorry for the trouble. It does, in fact, appear to be yet another case of Apple breaking things that used to work just fine. Thanks for the responses! :-)
But, if it is at all possible for iCamSource to somehow bypass Apple's FUBAR OS and let me use both firewire iSights, that would be awesome!
BELAY previous problem report, unless you want to fix Apple's SNAFU. I guess Apple broke the three-cam functionality with the last updates for migration to Lion. sigh.
iCamSource even seems to be working with both the internal iSight and ONE of the firewire iSights. I guess I'll have to put the other camera to some other use...
I have 1) internal iSight0, 2) firewire iSight1, 3) firewire iSight2. All of the iSights come and go in iCamSource with apparent randomness, although the internal iSight0 seems to be the most reliable and only fails about 50% of the time. The other two are failing 75%-100% or more of the time. I get the error on my iPhone: " Source Connection Error One or more of the iCamSources returned by the iCam Broker Server could not be connected to. "
The iCams also do not display very reliably within iCamSource's Preferences panel. i.e. when I click on each camera in the list the setup screen changes, but the video displayed is a frozen frame of either the camera in question, or iSight0.
Sometimes unplugging and replugging the cameras gets them re-recognized by iCamSource, but that's unacceptable as a long-distance surveillance system. This needs to get a LOT more robust to be viable.
I have tried using just ONE camera at a time, and everything works flawlessly for each camera, as long as it is the only one in iCamSource's Cameras list.
No other apps are running that access any of the cameras.
Aside: is there some way to REMOTELY reboot iCamSource, so if it freezes up while I'm half-way around the world I can get it running again?
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