Both cameras use the generic USB video driver as their primary recommended drivers. Neither have native drivers of their own.
And unfortunately, both cameras are mounted and difficult to move so I am not sure if connecting directly to the computer would help.
Both cameras are stable as long as I have audio turned off, so I am good. I know that Microsoft has had ongoing issues with their audio driver (audiodg.exe) and it may be their problem.
I will just let you know when I see anomalies in new releases, just in case someone left a little debugger code in.
Thanks for the quick responses. You have a really good product.
The cameras are both running from hubs. Both cameras use the Microsoft generic USB video drivers and all software is current.
I just ran it with motion detection turned off and it crashes immediately if audio is on. Runs fine with audio off. So I can't really check it.
I watched it enough with audio on and audio off that I am fairly sure I was not seeing motion causing the disk writing. When I had the audio off, I had no disk writes. When I had audio on one camera, I had no disk writes. When I had audio on both cameras, I had continuous disk write at about 5kB/sec.
One piece to the puzzle maybe. Both cameras are outside and it is dark now so the video stream is much smaller. When I turn audio on both cameras the disk writing does not occur. Icamsource 2.1.6 still disappears after a minute or two. With Icamsource 2.1.5, the audio would stop after some time, but the module did not terminate.
I'm running 2 USB cameras and have always had issues with the audio staying on. I have been losing audio from both cameras in 6 to 12 hours after starting.
I recently installed 2.1.6 and now icamsource just blows off after several minutes with no error message, it just goes away.
It runs with no problem if I have audio turned off on one, or both cameras. So I turned on Windows 7 Resource Monitor and watched it for a bit. With audio turned off, or on one camera only, there are no disk hits. If I turn on audio for both cameras, it looks like icamsource opens a thread and writes and reads about 5kB/sec to disk continuously. I presume the two cameras audio streams are too much for icamsource to process... but since I did not have my icam iphone ap turned on, why is icamsource doing anything with the audio? It does not store it and it was not sending it to the iphone. I'm running a quad core HP P6240 with 8 gig. Icamsource uses about 10% CPU. Please see if you can 1) see why it is buffering audio to the drive when two cameras audio streams are coming in and 2) if it really needs to do anything with the audio streams when the iphone icam app is not using it. Thanks
I have the same issue with two cameras running under Windows 7. Everything is up to date. I normally lose audio on the back camera in 4 to 8 hours and then lose audio on the front camera in about 8 to 16 hours. In my case, all I need to do is stop/start the icamsource module and the audio is restored.
I have 2 USB cameras that I have the audio turned on. Both use the generic Windows video drivers and are up to date. Sleep is turned off on the computer. One will consistently lose audio in under 12 hours and the other in under 24 hours. To turn audio back on, a simple stop/start on iCamsource is all that is required.
If in a future release of iCamsource, if you could include an auto restart or an auto stop/start that the user can specify every xx hours, my problem would be solved. It could also reduce any problems with memory leaks that occasionally show up.
I have 3 Agama V-1325R Night Vision Infrared 1.3M Pixel Webcams. They cost about $35 each at Amazon. Because they show IR, some daytime colors tend to shift to red/brown. Grass and tree leaves are shades of brown but most painted items, such as cars, keep their colors pretty good.
They have IR LEDs built into them but the LEDs are not powerful enough to show anything farther than about 5 feet from the camera in total darkness. So I also purchased several YY Trade IR30 - 60-90 degree WideAngle 30 LED Indoor/Outdoor Long Range 50ft IR Illuminators. They run about $17 at Amazon and come without the 12v adaptor. These IR lights only use about 3w of power and have a photo sensor that turns them off during the day. They are also nice and small, about the size of a tennis ball. At night when they are on, if you look directly at them, the light has a slight glow, similar to a cigarette but is hardly noticeable.
Although they claim 50 feet, they work best at about 10 to 25 feet. I have one on a ledge in my screened-in back porch pointing at my French Doors about 14 feet away. At night, in otherwise complete darkness, the camera has a good well-lighted view of the French Doors and several feet of wall and floor around them. When the doors are open, the inside of my house is also plainly viewable.
I have 2 USB cameras connected to my main Windows 7 computer. One is connected via 4 hubs and a total of about 60 feet. The other is connected via a single hub at 50 feet (the 50 foot run degrades the USB 2 to USB 1). Both work fine although my audio drops out after about 12-24 hours. I have 2 more USB cameras connected to an old XP computer that use 1 hub and both have about 20 foot runs.
When I first hooked them up, I had various instability problems and had to try different combinations of hubs, ports on my PC and wire lengths.
I bought the YY Trade IR30 - 60-90 degree WideAngle 30 LED Indoor/Outdoor Long Range 50ft IR Illuminator for $17 on Amazon. It comes without the 12v adapter for that price but is weatherproof and works great at about 20 feet. It has a photo sensor and comes on at dark and uses only 3w.
1) The ability to mask certain areas in the frame where motion detection should be ignored. For example, I have a reflection from a window that triggers a motion event when a car drives by. I would like to "paint" over the window and save it. This could also reduce the CPU load on doing the motion checking as the area being compared would be reduced. I still want to see the window in the recorded frames however. 2) Record before and after a motion event. I would like to have a setting where I can specify the number of seconds to record both before and after a motion event occurs. This helps to identify the direction the person came from/went to and puts the motion event in more context. 3) Review motion events from within iCamsource. I would like to be able to view motion events in iCamsource the way I view them on the iPhone rather than looking through a bunch of folders. It would be nice to also be able to export selected sections of them to an AVI or MPG file. It would also be nice to have a checkbox next to each folder that I could check and then do a global delete after viewing. 4) Restart iCam source from the iPhone. I generally run 4 USB cameras and will now probably expand to 6. Occasionally I will have a camera that goes off line and I must manually stop iCamsource and restart it. Today I use RDM+Lite on my iPhone to do a remote connection and to reset iCamsource. But a little reset button would be a lot nicer. (Or maybe, iCamsource could "sense" that a camera had stopped and attempt to restart it. Using a USB analyzer, I see where normally I have a 5mb/s stream per camera, it drops to 50 b/s or so when the camera drops). 5) Reduce the number of folders generated not to exceed 1 per hour. Right now each motion event generates a folder, many with only a single frame or two. I think it would be easier to search and use if you only generated a unique folder once per hour. I think it would also speed up the display on the iPhone since the index would be reduced in size. 6) Allow for a camera settings tab in iCamsource for UVC supported cameras. I'm not sure what all is available within UVC, but ManyCam allows zoom and exposure settings for UVC. I presume you could match what ManyCam does.
OK, Never mind. With a powered USB hub, I seem to be fine now.
I do use about 50% cpu on this single core computer with 2 cameras running. With your soon to be released iCam 2.0, I think a lot of users will begin to run into cpu issues as they go beyond 4 cameras.
Not sure how you prioritize your enhancements, but it would be nice to have either a frames per second setting or a cpu throttle setting. With FPS, I could specify, say 3 FPS and see how much cpu I was using and adjust up or down until I got to the correct cpu usage. Or if you gave a cpu throttle setting, I could say 20% of cpu and see how many FPS I was getting.
In my old setup, prior to iCam, I used to record 2 frames per second, which was plenty for security purposes.
The generic cameras do not have any drivers of their own. They are Agama V-1325R infra-red cameras and they use UVP and and the vendor boasts that you can avoid the hassle of installing drivers.
CPU load is small and I have been running several different cameras on this machine. The preview videos both are working fine.
But since posting, I think might be pushing the USB power limits. When running multiple different cameras earlier, they were on shorter connections. I now am running from USB to Cat5 and then back to USB. Both of the USB to Cat5 and back use some power. When I turned the audio off on both cameras, I got a connection to the iPhone.
I need to add a powered USB hub and retest, I might be OK. Will post again after doing that. Thanks
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