Keep losing my Ycam connection - any ideas?

[JeremyF]

I have 8 YCAMs (4 of the 'original' version and 4 YCAM Knights, two of which are in outdoor enclosures). All the cameras are connected wirelessly and are within 15m of the main wireless router in the house. 2 of the cameras are outside the house (although mounted directly on the house wall) and 2 are in the garage (within the house) and these 4 are connected via a wireless repeater in the garage. I'm using a repeater because I struggled to get a connection with the 2 external cameras in particular, even though they are within a reasonable range of the router (there are up to 3 walls the signal has to pass through in the worst case, one of which is a metal garage door). I control which camera connects to which router using the cameras MAC address. I use BlueIris to view the cameras locally and remotely.

I have no issues with the 4 cameras connected directly (wirelessly) to the main router. However, I keep (every few minutes) losing the connection to one or more of the 4 cameras connected via the repeater in the garage. The repeater is connected wirelessly to the main router and that connection appears to be strong (<10m and 1 block wall plus 1 stud wall). I don't lose all 4 cameras at once and it varies which one(s) I lose. Sometimes the connection re-establishes itself, usually it doesn't. I've tried playing with wireless channels to see if that helps (I have a second wireless network and a SONOS music system that communicates wirelessly in the house) but it doesn't make much difference (and all are on separate channels, as separate numerically as I can make them).

Anyone have any idea why this might be happening? Thanks!

[Dwayne]

I have had a similar situation here, 6 cameras, most of them y-cams, 2 were connected through a wlan repeater, which used to loose connection at least daily with self connecting, once a week with need to be reseted.

using a wlan repeater brings a lot of problems with it: usually you have to use the same channel as the main access point, which only gives good results, if the repeater is at the end of the access area of the access point, and the cameras are within the repeaters area, but outside the main routers area.

but in your (also in mine) configuration this is hardly the case.

additionally, if you use a repeater the available bandwith drops to its half (because packets have to be received and sent again) and ping response time doubles - now considering that wlan response times are always a bit longer than lan, and now doubled - that can easily lead to a drop of the stream, if only a bit of disturbance comes in.

I finally decided to pull a new lan cable to the "weak" area of my original wlan and set up there an additional access point, same ssid, but different channel. you must be at least 2 steps lower or higher than the original routers channel.
y-cams choose the strongest signal if they find 2 wlans with the same ssid on different channels.

going this way, you make sure that other mobile devices like our laptop will work anywhere in your house, choosing the strongest signal.

my current configuration is now:

4 wlan access points, all connected by lan to the network, same ssid but different channels.
within this net there are 6 wlan cameras and 10 (!) wlan VoIP phones running without any problems.

[Twilo123]

channels 6 & 11 are strongest for 802.11g and are far enough apart. keep in mind everyone typically uses 6 & 11 also so you may have crowding from neighbors depending on how close they are.

i am not too familiar with y-cam. they are not popular by me but looks like they use rtsp streams which are udp packets and have no built in checking mechanism to see if packets are getting to the destination. in many cases this is not an issue since the video codec and application usually make up for any frame loss but get enough of them and you will drop. if it has mjpg setting try that and see if it helps. you will lose audio those with mjpg.

[JeremyF]

Thanks for the advice!

I've made a few changes and the cameras seem more stable now in that I don't keep losing the image from Blue Iris. It still happens occasionally, but much less than before.

What I'm noticing now, though, is that the cameras appear to freeze every now and then (I can see the clock stops ticking over) and then pick up again. For example, the postman just came and he didn't appear on the camera at my front door at all, he magically appeared in the distance at the house next door a couple of seconds later.

Does this sound like I still have a connection problem between the wireless router and the repeater?

[Twilo123]

if you are using mjpg you will see missing pieces like that depending on the actual frame rate you can get. typically on local network you will get 1 frame per second. remotely for instance on my iphone/bb/android/winmo apps i get anywhere from 1fps to 1 frame every 2-6 seconds so it becomes more choppy. it's not that it loses connection there are just many variables to getting the next picture. also, jpg pictures are considered full pictures everytime whereas the other codecs use algorithms to fudge pictures without needing every one of them.

now if you are using other codecs like mp4, h.264 etc. they were designed differently and will typically buffer in a media player and play as a complete video. when the buffer hits it's limit it needs to rebuffer the next part of the stream and you could have hiccups there.

[Dwayne]

if you are using mjpg you will see missing pieces like that depending on the actual frame rate you can get. typically on local network you will get 1 frame per second.

Sorry, but that isn't true - I run mjpeg with my y-cams here in my lan and wlan and can easily get 15 fps.

[Twilo123]

sorry i meant with my app. actual that i know of is really 30fps. correct me if i am wrong on this.

regardless though i think i got my point across.

[Twilo123]

i mean technically mjpg is a compression method itself so you don't actually get the 'full' picture but a compressed picture.

other codecs like mp4 not only compress the image but only send the difference in pictures between each frame.

hopefully that clears it up on a more technical aspect.