Poor frame rate over wifi on iPhone

[Craig0]

I just purchased this application and I am having a problem getting an acceptable frame rate over a wifi connection. The icamsource framerate on the PC is great, but the icam frame rate on the iPhone is terrible.......probably 1 fps.

FWIW I am using a Linksys WVC54GCA connected via ethernet.   

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

CrAig  

[Stefan]

Are you connecting via the same local WiFi network? Are you connecting to a USB or network IP camera? Is the % CPU usage of the iCamSource running high when you are connected with iCam? What are the specs (CPU, memory, operating system) of the computer running the iCamSource?

[Craig0]

Are you connecting via the same local WiFi network? Are you connecting to a USB or network IP camera? Is the % CPU usage of the iCamSource running high when you are connected with iCam? What are the specs (CPU, memory, operating system) of the computer running the iCamSource?

The iphone is connected via wifi to the same network subnet as the camera.  The camera is wired (ethernet).  No the CPU usage is low, typically between 2-5%. iCamSource is running on my Windows Vista x64 PC...specs:

Mobo - Intel DX58SO
CPU - Intel Core i7 920
Memory - DDR3 6GB
Video - Nvidia GTX 260

logging in to the mjpeg URL directly from the iphone using Safari  yields a much better result. 

[Stefan]

What are the image size and frame rate settings of the network camera? If you try lowering the fps or image size, does that have a positive effect?

[Craig0]

What are the image size and frame rate settings of the network camera? If you try lowering the fps or image size, does that have a positive effect?

set to 320x240 @ 15 fps on normal quality.  Lowering these settings doesn't improve my experience. Motion is still very jerky. Should I be expecting to see motion similar to the icamsource?

[Stefan]

If you lower your fps (to say, 5 fps) and that doesn't help, then that isn't the issue. You shouldn't expect to see exactly what the iCamSource is seeing in terms of frame rate, but you should be getting more than 1 fps.

Is your WiFi network 802.11b, 802.11g or 802.11n? I experienced spotty frame rates when I had 3 WiFi cameras all transmitting over the same 802.11g WiFi network, and moving them to a different router cleared things up tremendously. I understand that your camera is hard-wired, but is there a lot of other traffic on your WiFi network that the iPhone might be fighting with?

[Craig0]

If you lower your fps (to say, 5 fps) and that doesn't help, then that isn't the issue. You shouldn't expect to see exactly what the iCamSource is seeing in terms of frame rate, but you should be getting more than 1 fps.
Is your WiFi network 802.11b, 802.11g or 802.11n? I experienced spotty frame rates when I had 3 WiFi cameras all transmitting over the same 802.11g WiFi network, and moving them to a different router cleared things up tremendously. I understand that your camera is hard-wired, but is there a lot of other traffic on your WiFi network that the iPhone might be fighting with?

I have only the one active client on my wifi network and that is my iPhone.  Lowering the frame rate to 5fps doesn't help.  It seems as though the motion is smooth for a brief moment (maybe a second) and then it freezes momentarily (probably for another second) and then the cycle repeats.  There is no fluid motion.  If I view the mjpeg url from my neighbours Wifi network (ie viewing across the internet) the motion is quite smooth. 

Is the iCamSource transcoding the mjpeg stream?  If so I wonder if this transcode is the problem?

Also what exactly is the role of the broker server? I assume that iCamSource maintains a connection with the broker and when the icam client on the iphone connects to the broker the broker matches the hash (from the user/pword) and then the video is "bridged" from the iCamSource <--> Broker connection to the Broker <--> iCam connection??  so the iphone is never directly connected to my camera, but is connected through the broker? 

 

[Stefan]

When you are connecting from your neighbor's WiFi over the Internet and the video is smooth, are you connecting from your iPhone? Or simply viewing the MJPEG URL stream from their web browser?

An MJPEG video stream is simply a sequence of JPEG images, and when those images are received by the iCamSource they are processed to detect motion and then resized and compressed to be sent to iCam. If the iCamSource's % CPU usage is low, then that is most likely not a problem. If the motion is smooth on the iCamSource, then the camera-to-iCamSource communication is not the problem. If you are connecting via your local network over your LAN then you should be getting more than 1 fps between iCam and the iCamSource.

Do you perhaps have more than one internet connection or a VPN on your local network?

The iCam Broker Server actually only "brokers" the initial connection between iCam and the iCamSource. Once iCam on your iPhone has connected to the iCamSource on your computer everything streams directly between iCam and the iCamSource without going through the server.

If you could go to http://whatismyipaddress.com/ from the computer running the iCamSource and e-mail support@skjm.com what it says your external IP address is then we can attempt to look it up in the Broker Server logs and hopefully troubleshoot the problem.

Please reference this forum post and your forum user name in your e-mail.