Help me choose the right IP camera!

Matt Ayres

n3wb
Sep 15, 2014
1
0
Hi there... I am looking for a PTZ dome style IP camera to install in the ceiling of our new showroom.
The camera is going to stream to about 3 - 4 brand new panasonic AS600 smart TV over the LAN
I assume the best way to get the feed is by loading the IP address of the camera from the browser but I need to know which camera can definitely do this!
I also want to know what the lag will be like... ideally I do not want any lag and assume there should be any seeing as its all going over Cat 5E
 
Buy a dahua/eyesurv camera and buy a ION dvr for each tv or split the output from one nvr to the 4 tvs. I don't think they will work with a browser from a smart tv.
 
Yeah you probably won't get it to work from a smart TV's browser.

Latency with IP cameras is always present (much more than with analog cameras) because of all the various encoding, streaming, and decoding buffers. Without this bit of latency, you would get extremely choppy video. In Dahua's web interface this lag is a bit configurable, and can be less than half a second. In other programs it may be a full second or more of delay.
 
Matt, I have Blue Iris installed on a computer that is running my network cameras. I can view and control them on my LG smart tv through the tv browser. As bp2000 stated, there will be latency.
 
gordo, is the frame rate acceptable in the tv browser? I'm sure you are using a jpeg-based page which would mean the frame rate is likely no higher than 5 to 10 FPS, and likely slower.
 
Yeah, I've been able to pull JPEG images up to about 20 frames per second with a 1080p video stream as the source, assuming gigabit networking and near-zero latency and a competent web server. The problem with a lot of modern h264 cameras is their jpeg snapshot support is limited. Hikvision cams offer up only 1 FPS snapshots for example. Request it any more often and it sends you duplicates. Blue Iris will turn just about any camera stream into a JPEG/MJPEG stream with a pretty decent frame rate, but the latency added by this process is unavoidable.
 
The problem is going to be there are plugins required to be installed in browsers to view IP Cameras; they dont use native HTML5 Video embedding.. its all pripotary bullshit that needs a plugin.

Plugins provided are built for x86 cpu architecture; smart TV's are not using that architecture and will be unable to install the plugin even if they had the capability..

The web-ui of the cameras simply wont load, using JPEG's to display to 4 smart TV's has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas ive heard yet.. if you want to spend a ton of money for exceptionally poor performance presuming you ever get it to work.. Go for it. Let me guess your going to do it over Wifi too? The TV's them selves will be all out of sync from eachother and a bunch of nasty shit is gona disapoint you... latency will be critically high; probably several seconds with this plan at BEST.

pal251 is on the right idea, wire the camera into a NVR with HDMI output, split the output to 4 TV's and be done with it... If latency is unacceptable you probably should be looking at HD-SDI cameras vs IP cameras.

Last I checked cameras dont have Gigabit ethernet or near the resources to give you anywhere near close to 20 JPEG images a second... your lucky to get 1FPS
 
but who wants to see 1FPS of JPEG images locally? Thats no video thats stop motion animation.. especially on 4 HD TV's

I am doing the exact same thing for my cameras so I can view them remotely... but to display that on a local TV would be worthless.. I never ever even consider viewing that page locally, its ONLY for when I am remote on internet so poor that a real h264 stream is not going to happen.
 
pal251 is on the right idea, wire the camera into a NVR with HDMI output, split the output to 4 TV's and be done with it... If latency is unacceptable you probably should be looking at HD-SDI cameras vs IP cameras.

Yeah, I agree, that is the right approach.

Last I checked cameras dont have Gigabit ethernet or near the resources to give you anywhere near close to 20 JPEG images a second... your lucky to get 1FPS

Yes, no camera will do that, but a PC can, decoding h264 video. Since Blue Iris' recent web server update you can actually go beyond 20 FPS pretty easily if you pull an mjpeg stream from a 1080p camera. But at this point you are using more than 20 Mbps of bandwidth which is absurdly high for something like a Smart TV. It probably couldn't decode the frames even as fast as its WiFi would pull them in.

That's why some of the methods shown in my prior post here use direct access to the IP Cameras to avoid using anything acting as a go-between/middleman, for better FPS rates.
...
Here is an example that's at 1280x720 default image size
...
Don

For each image request to your server, about 700 ms of the request time is "waiting" for the response from the server to begin, followed by about 400ms of actual transfer time.

So I assume your example is having your web server proxy each image request to the camera. i.e.

1. Browser requests image from server.
2. Server requests image from camera.
3. Server receives image from camera.
4. Browser receives image from server.

Contrary to what you said about FPS rates, I bet you could more than double the frame rate for a remote user like myself if you were to have the server sit there and continually pull images from the camera as quickly as possible, always caching the latest one in memory. Then when a remote browser requests the camera image, you just send the frame you have cached in memory, and this will more or less eliminate the 700 ms waiting time so each frame takes only 400 ms to load instead of 1100ms. It also makes the server code a lot more complicated, but it results in a better user experience and makes the system more scalable as the camera's web server doesn't get hammered harder when there are multiple viewers.
 
gordo, is the frame rate acceptable in the tv browser? I'm sure you are using a jpeg-based page which would mean the frame rate is likely no higher than 5 to 10 FPS, and likely slower.

bp2000, I hooked it just to see if it would work, but never checked how well it worked and never use the tv for cameras. I've been checking now for a few hours.
The latency is about 2 seconds, and the framerate is at best 1 fps, as nayr posted, it looks like stop motion.
 
no matter what you do you still have to open a connection, request the image, get the image, close the connection and repeat in ad nauseum.. thats alot of latency that wont go away no matter how clever you implement it... an HDMI connection to an NVR has none of that and splitting it wont add any latency and this ensures all 4 monitors are in perfect sync.

30FPS of h264 is several orders of magnitude better than 1FPS of JPEG, the whole idea of using a SmartTV on a JPEG stream for dedicated security monitors is completely absurd.. just give it up... you might as well have a color laser printer that can print 60 pages a min and have it churn out live "video" stream...
 
Not giving it up, lol.

Your solution offers no IP Camera control of any kind whatsoever. Not sure what you are missing about that. Additionally. If the device/TV can support the required plugin or media player required then all of this is a moot point.

Even IF the TV supported the required media player for the IP Cameras and NOT any required plugin for the IP Cameras. You still don't have IP Camera controls.

Get It?

Don

He is saying to use an NVR, and HDMI output to the TVs.

So the "Smart" portion of the TV is not even used, and the NVR can control the cameras.
 
security monitors dont need to control a camera, they just display the cameras; are these Televisions touchscreen so someone can go tap around on it?

Ive got dedicated monitors for viewing my cameras which include 2 PTZ's, if I want to move those around I use a computer/phone/tablet with the appropriate software to do so.. otherwords the PTZ's are looking at what they should be looking at and displaying it in real time, full speed on my monitors... If I wanted to I could plug a real PTZ Joystick into an NVR and put a joystick near each monitor for control..

This sounds like a business; and if the employees have enough time to be looking around the lobby all day on the camera then you need to give them more work to do.
 
More features that are not needed in exchange for the loss of a decent frame-rate and useful monitoring.. you got it, thats bad engineering on all accounts.

The point of dedicated monitors is so you can do other stuff while keeping an eye on the lobby/door/etc... Ive got a dedicated monitor right here I can use my keyboard and mouse to control the PTZ (at full quality and framerate)... 99% of the time I am just looking and not controlling; would I be willing to degrade my video quality to nearly unusable levels just so I can manually take control 1% of the time? Hell no. A Good PTZ can auto-tour, auto-pan etc if you need the camera to monitor several locations.. you can even put contact switches on doors and stuff so when a customer enters the PTZ focuses on them and then goes back to monitoring products..

There's plenty of ways to display security cameras on a HDTV and also control a PTZ in real time; using a smart-tv is about the worst possible solution in a sea of really good solutions.. but then again I see your a fan of Foscam so that explains why your fond of the technically worst solution available.
 
Thanks for your service.. Your opinion does not offend me; its just poor advice.. I tend to call people out on bad advice, its part of my job that includes designing/coding/implementing military communications software.. dont take it personally Sargent, sorry but your opinion is not sound advice.. Its an interesting idea horribly flawed in many ways.
 
Uh oh @nayr...you have pissed off the uberlord.... Did you not read his "about me" how dare you! :cool: Watch your back dude.. :livid:
 
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I have used the IP cameras below for my factory and office monitoring. It works like a charm!
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