Problem connecting to new IP camera - Slow video \ app crashes

[brodel]

Ello,

I have been using the skjm icam iphone app with the windows source app for a few months now and it's been nothing less than fantastic. I show people on my iPhone and they want to do it too and I of course point them here and a few of them get it for themselves.

Anyway.. I recently got an IP camera to get a better view of what I was looking at. I set it up in the application and it seems to work for a second. I can see video but it's HORRIBLY slow. I set it up downstairs and got it where I wanted it and when I came upstairs to check on it, I could see myself in front of the camera setting it up.

The processor jumps straight to 99% utilization as soon as I click start now and after a few minutes it will just give up and die.

I searched around and found some posts related to this saying it might help to update the C++ runtime stuff. I did that, but it didn't help.

I don't know what else to try. Any ideas would be most appreciated. Thanks much.

[Stefan]

What is the image size and frame rate of the MJPEG stream coming from your camera? If you set both of those too high (say 640x480 or greater with the best image quality at 30 fps) then you are going to be sending a very large amount of video data over your local network, and you are going to be requiring that the iCamSource on your computer receive and process all of those frames of video data.

I would suggest bringing the frame rate down to around 5 fps and possibly the image size down to 320x240, which is about the resolution of your iPhone.

I currently run 3 MJPEG WiFi cameras on their own 802.11g WiFi router (to keep my 802.11n free) on my network at 640x480 @ 2 fps. I kept the resolution high so that the raw saved Motion Event images would have the best resolution, and I dropped the fps down to 2 because the iCamSource only checks for and records motion once every half-second. I have all 3 iCamSources running on a 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac mini 2,1 with 1 GB of RAM that was purchased in November 2008 without any CPU issues. (They each use less than 5% when running.)

I believe that dropping the frame rate down will help the most.

[brodel]

That's all it was!

Thanks. I guess I was thinking of the software "pulling" it as opposed to the camera "pushing" the video into the application. In any case, adjusting those settings fixed the issue and the CPU isn't pegged. I am gonna play with it to see if I can get an even trade off for video quality and performance. Thanks again!

[Stefan]

You are most welcome!