High CPU useage even with no motion detection

[tjosgood]

Hi everyone, been using iCam a few days now and its working pretty well  - I think its a great bit of software for keeping an eye on the new kittens!

I initially had problems with very very slow frame rates over local network and 3g using version 2.4.4 but following advice from another thread I downgraded to 2.4.3b and that made it much smoother.

Now I only have 1 problem with the otherwise perfect software and that is the very high CPU consumption at all times.

If i have motion detection on with low interval and audio on it uses about 30% at all times
with motion detection disabled and audio about 20%
and with both disabled about 12%

Ideally i would like both these features and be able to enable/disable them from my iPhone but I understand the motion detection will need constant image processing and therefore constant cpu useage.

However with no motion detection (disabled) why does the software still use such a high amount of CPU

Why can it not just sit there in listen mode and close the camera using practically zero CPU. How do I make it do this?

I dont mind the CPU useage when its actually in use or doing motion detection but sometimes I need the computer for other remote processes like serving videos to my ipad so I need to free the CPU up as much as possible for encoding

my current solution is to use remote desktop to close the icamsource process when im not using it and start it again when i want to connect which is not ideal 

so basically my question is how do I make it just close the webcam and just listen until i connect from my ipad so it uses no CPU while idle?

Details:
Vmicro USB camera with built in mic
windows 7 64bit
4gb ram
AMD 1.6Ghz dual core E-350
ATI 6300

(I realise its not a super fast pc - it is a media centre but it is not about how much cpu it uses when connected its about using less when its idle)

Thanks!
Tom.

[SKJM Support]

Thank you for your post, and I am sorry that you are having problems.

How many (and what kind) of cameras are you using with the iCamSource application?

[tjosgood]

Hi, I am using a single USB camera, it is a Vmicro Venus pretty old and cheap but it has smooth framerate now.

[SKJM Support]

If you close the iCamSource preference pane (not exiting the program) does it have any effect on the CPU usage?

[tjosgood]

No, the figures I quoted were with the window closed and no devices viewing the camera remotely. If i connect using my iphone it goes up to about 50-60% but that is understandable!

[SKJM Support]

The numbers seem a little high, but not dramatically so.  The problem is, there is other stuff running in the process besides our code, the webcam drivers for example.  That's one reason that different people will experience different CPU usage on similar computers.

[tjosgood]

Is there not an option to disconnect from the usb camera when no idevice is connected so it unloads the webcam drivers and only loads them when somone connects?

[SKJM Support]

There is not a way to remotely START/STOP iCamSource through the iCam software but some of our users use VNC to Start/Stop iCamSource remotely. That is a feature that has been requested in the past and is currently on our list of potential features to implement in the future.

Some of our users discuss VNC in this forum post: http://skjm.com/forum/index.php?topic=2732.0

[tjosgood]

Yes I have also started using the VNC method I guess this is good for now!