IP camera view blue screen..... occasionally...

[jamo]

My IP camera on my gate is working nicely. When I use the security Scenario from the orbiter to pop up the camera viewer, it works well....

But, on occasion, the camera view disappears- The "wrapper" with all the command buttons like "speak" and the pan and zoom buttons etc is there but no camera stream in the middle. Now the camera stream is still working (can confirm by going directly to the camera's IP and it's built in view) and, I think, even the motion clips are all being recorded and the events fired on motion during this time.

Rebooting the core sorts it out and, I may be wrong, but I think occasionally a reload of the core sorts it out.

Any ideas where to troubleshoot?

[sambuca]

Do you use the motion wrapper to detect motion? It might be that this is causing your problem, as you say that you get an image when accessing the camera directly. I suppose you could try to configure the camera without using motion, and see if the problem goes away.

Btw, what camera do you have? I'm currently trying to make a more advanced IP camera template for LMCE, which takes advantage of build-in motion detection support. Do you know if your camera have that?

br,
sambuca

[jamo]

Do you use the motion wrapper to detect motion?

I do, indeed. It is wrapped by motion wrapper. And I must say that is working nicely at the moment. Haven't tinkered too much with the motion settings themselves but I do have my camera popping up for 30s on the TV every time motion is detected and I'm quite keen to refine that a bit with some enhancements and possibly have slightly different behaviour depending on security mode and various other factors. Will wikify when I get it a bit more stable because there doesn't seem to be too much in the howtos on "respond to events" and "cameras".

My camera is a cheap type with a manual badly translated from Mandarin or something-
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/EasyN_FS-603A-M106_IP_Camera

It supposedly has all the built in features- motion detection, e-mail you on motion detection etc etc but I haven't bothered with any of that because I planned to wrap it with LMCE software.

How are you getting on with the more advanced template? My concern would be that with cheap and poorly supported cameras like mine one might battle to get the specs/communication working so I would prefer to do all that stuff in the wrapper myself and then I don't have to buy the more expensive devices.... just plug in the cheap-o, set it up with username password and get the videostream and then use LMCE/wrappers to do all the advanced stuff.

[sambuca]

Cameras using SMTP/Mail or FTP upload on motion detection are not the ideal to interface with, but that said, I might try to add support for that too. My concern is whether the camera actually sends an email/ftp when the motion has stopped. If not, LMCE would consider the detector to be in the tripped state even though motion has stopped...

The template supports motion detection for D-Link cameras at the moment. I use a DCS-2121 to do testing, but I suspect that all D-Link cameras are built on the same firmware.

br,
sambuca