Support for the Foscam F19821w V2?

Lisaweb

Hi,

I am currently running an open source surveillance program on my PC but it is working the poor processor to death and the fan is roaring like an airplane engine! Then it dawned on me that I might be able to use my Mac Mini (once used for Internet TV but now lying dormant after we bought a Roku).

After checking out reviews, I ended up here. Just need to know before I take the plunge... does this software support the Foscam F19821w V2 (with the latest firmware)?

http://foscam.us/foscam-fi9821w-megapixel-wireless-ip-camera-105.html

Thanks!
-Lisa

Ben

Hi Lisa,

We don't officially support the FI9821W due to problems reported by our users, however you should try this for yourself, as some users have managed to get it working OK. There is a profile for the FI9821W in SecuritySpy (in the device list in the Video Device Settings window) that should be used with the camera - simply enter the camera's IP address and username/password, and select the H.264 format option. Just make sure that you have installed the latest firmware available from firmware onto your cameras, as older firmware had lots of bugs.

Let us know how you get on.

Lisaweb

Thanks for your reply Ben. Got the FI9821W (with latest firmware) set up using the demo version, and everything's working great, except for the PTZ presets, they don't work. I haven't had this problem with the 2 other surveillance programs I tried out, so I think it may be a problem in SecuritySpy rather than the camera.

Using the demo, I really like how easily the Mac Mini handles all the video. Much better than the PC does!

One other question, in the open source program I was using, I was able to program the camera to automatically pan/tilt/zoom in on the area of detected motion. Does SecuritySpy support this feature as well?

Ben

Hi Lisa,

Great to hear you have it working well. I hope the lack of presets isn't a big problem.

Sorry but there is no feature to automatically move to point to the area of detected motion. Since the camera doesn't have optical zoom, this wouldn't be particularly useful anyway (digital zoom doesn't add any more detail to the image, and if the motion is happening to the side of the camera's frame it will be captured just as well as if it were happening right in the middle of the frame).

Lisaweb

Thanks Ben, Yes it only has digital zoom, but I'd like to request that you really consider adding the tracking feature. Reason is, I have my camera aimed at my front gate, but without auto-tracking, by the time they go down the path to my front door, they are out of camera range. With the auto-tracking feature, the camera follows the person all the way to my front door. By that time, they are really close and I can get a real clear view of them. So for me, it's really a very important feature.

Ben

Hi Lisa,

From your description it does indeed sound like a useful feature, however I can't see how it would be possible to get this to work reliably without a significant amount of sophisticated image processing that would put a big dent into the computer's CPU usage (this may be why your previous computer was working so hard!). On top of this, PTZ control varies considerably between different cameras, so that when the software issues a PTZ command it doesn't know how much the camera is actually going to rotate. I think these issues would make this feature almost impractical to implement, so I'm afraid that I don't think we'll be adding this to SecuritySpy any time soon.

ConvenInteg

Hi. I just set up two of these Foscam FI9821W V2 cameras for a friend the other day. I was fairly impressed with the quality.

The camera's default HTTP port was 83 and while I kept that, both cameras appeared fine in SecuritySpy.

I changed the cameras' HTTP ports to 8152 and 8153 for port forwarding reasons, though. Now the cameras' video does not appear in SecuritySpy, even though I specified the port number in the SS device configuration settings.

I changed the cameras' HTTP port back to 83 and SecuritySpy worked fine. Thought I'd try port 84 for the second camera and that does not work either. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Ben

We have seen exactly this problem with the FI9821W cameras too: they don't seem to like their ports being set to anything but their default ones.

If you need direct access to the cameras from the internet, this can normally be achieved by setting a different external vs. internal port for the port forwarding rule in the router. So for each rule the internal (LAN) port is always 83, and the external (WAN) port is unique. Most routers allow you to do this, but not all.

However, if you have the cameras set up in SecuritySpy, then you would just need a single port forwarding rule for SecuritySpy, which would allow you to view all your cameras via SecuritySpy's web interface.

evansgo

Without wishing to inflame, I've been trying your software alongside Evocam to evaluate which one is best for me. I have a FI9821W which I very painfully upgraded to the latest firmware and Evocam located it straight away, but your software could not "see" it. I have amended the port number as I never like leaving them on defaults and I have to admit, before I read this forum I was about to remove SecuritySpy and list it as a failure. I will try again and set it back to default, but based on the fact that it worked perfectly in Evocam, I do suspect its something in your software and not the camera.

Ben

Hi @evansgo - by using the latest firmware and resetting the camera to its default ports, you will hopefully have some success with this camera and SecuritySpy, as other users have.

These cameras implement two streaming methods: standard RTSP and Foscam's own proprietary stream over its "media port". The proprietary stream is used for Foscam's own software (e.g. the browser plugin for Windows) and used to work much more reliably than RTSP. I do know that some software developers have reverse-engineered the Foscam stream in order to get around the problems with RTSP, so this may be why the other software worked. However in SecuritySpy we prefer to spend our development resources on standard formats such as RTSP. Foscam has been steadily improving their RTSP implementation, so by resetting to the default ports I think you will have some success.

Let us know how you get on.

evansgo

OK will do thanks for the feedback.

HA1

Hi, I'm unclear: are we saying that presets don't work on this Foscam model? I have them setup using the built-in Foscam webapp and they work fine through there. Any way to use these in Security Spy? This is especially critical because the PTZ doesn't work in SpyGlass app. When I click up or down, for example, using the app, it just pans all the way to top-most position or down-most position, which isn't useful. I'd like to be able to set a few presets that I could have camera immediately go back to using Spyglass.