Alternatives to iCam --- Giving Up on iCam and iCam Pro

[RyokichiSagane]

Just curious if the community has any recommendations on alternatives to iCam. I am giving up on iCam and iCam Pro based on very bad stability and performance, and the costs in my time to trouble shoot this software.

[rjgvt]

Not sure what issues you are having, but both of your 2 posts gave no details. I doubt that anyone on here that is using iCamsource will have lots of recommendations for an alternative to iCamsource. You'll have to search the web for that.

I have been using the basic iCamsource for several years and my setup with 7 cams is very stable.

[raymate]

You have 7 cams are they all wired or wifi?

I have just posted I have problems keeping DATA rates down and my 2.4GHz is flooded. I also have 7 cams 6are wifi

I  been using for at least 6 years. I looked for alternatives and there is not any, It really need to support h.264. Finding MJPEG cams is hard I had couple of dead cameras last year and finding something was difficult that had HD, D-LINK do 2 cams and so far I have had nothing but issues with the new ones dying.

If iCam did h.264 it would help so much.

[Stefan]

As mentioned in our response to your other post, bandwidth can be reduced by reducing the MJPEG frame rate output by your network IP cameras: http://skjm.com/forum/index.php?topic=6616.0

As for iCam support h.264, we are actively looking into it, but there are, unfortunately, other issues.

We have discussed the legal/licensing issues of h.264 decoding previously, but there are other things to consider when talking about 7 cameras, and that is CPU usage.

You are correct that h.264 cameras use less bandwidth than MJPEG cameras, and that is due to the vastly improved compression algorithm. The problem is that decoding the h.264 video stream to perform the motion detection checks would require a lot more CPU processing power than the MJPEG streams. Multiply that by 7 cameras and I am guessing that most computers these days would not be able to handle it.

This would be the equivalent of streaming 7 1080p HD YouTube videos to your computer at once, in addition to the additional motion detection processing and re-encoding of video to save to disk when motion is detected, the uploading to the cloud for backup, etc.

[imlabecs]

I just threw money down the toilet because there is no support for this software. Amazing. Shame on SKJM.

[Stefan]

I just threw money down the toilet because there is no support for this software. Amazing. Shame on SKJM.

 

It appears as if 13 minutes passed between your first post (http://skjm.com/forum/index.php?topic=6617.0) and this one. Did you try contacting us earlier, perhaps via another method that we may have missed?

Actually, it appears you did send us an email 44 minutes before this post. We try to respond to support requests within 12 to 24 hours, so if you reached out previously, our apologies!

[rjgvt]

You have 7 cams are they all wired or wifi?

I have just posted I have problems keeping DATA rates down and my 2.4GHz is flooded. I also have 7 cams 6are wifi

I  been using for at least 6 years. I looked for alternatives and there is not any, It really need to support h.264. Finding MJPEG cams is hard I had couple of dead cameras last year and finding something was difficult that had HD, D-LINK do 2 cams and so far I have had nothing but issues with the new ones dying.

If iCam did h.264 it would help so much.

I have 3 Airlink IP cams at a remote location hard wired (Ethernet) to the router and accessing remotely from my home computer.

I have 2 Airlink IP cams at home, 1 is running wireless and the other is wired to a WiFi extender that has an Ethernet port. The other 2 cams are Logitech 9000 webcams connected to dedicated Windows 7 Pro computer. I only use this computer for running iCamSource, Dropbox, Irfanview, Google Drive and an anti-virus. I don't do any websurfing on this computer.