Hi There, Anyone seen this issue and fixed it? Camera works fine in every way, but the video stream shows a green screen approximately every half second.
If you are connected via wifi you can make it better, but you will never truly fix this issue with Foscam units. You can attach it to a wifi AP and get a lot better reliability and throughput, but really at the cost of doing that you could just buy a better camera when you add that to the cost of the Foscam camera. Another option is to lower down your bit rate to like 512k and your frame rate to about 10fps. I fought these foscam issues for months. I have two locations and put Dahua cameras in one and those have worked well. At my home I went with HiKvision to replace the Foscam units and have been very pleased. I will probably stick with HiKVision for any future purchases. The Foscams have issues. Yes I know you think that you see good quality from them directly in a browser and that the green screen is a Security Spy issue. It's not. If you watch time stamps and such in the browser you will see some issues of dropped frames.... You will forever be frustrated by Foscam. They truly do not transmit a stream that doesn't have bad packets and any software trying to use the video packets to enable motion detection and such will have issues. Every time it thought I hd come up with a magic formula to make the Foscams reliable it would turn out to be just a short lived success. I put in Ubiquiti LR access points and did some wild wifi network set ups .... And even with bypassing the Foscam wifi radios and using a Access point with Ethernet connection direct to the Foscam I could not get reliable service. I used an Apple Airport Express set up to just join a wifi network created by my ubiquiti Long range AP's and with just one Foscam camera plugged into one of the Ethernet ports on the Airport Express I would occasionally get the green screen. As the Airport Express has two Ethernet ports I unhooked the Foscam, replaced it with Hikvision and the plugged a second Hikvision into the second Ethernet port on the Airport express and running bit rates of 2048 and frame rates of 20 to 25 FPS on both cameras and it runs great.
Bottom line....Foscam is a waste of time and money in my view. If you read all the various posts on this Forum I do not think you can find anyone with kind words about Fiscam. I know it's tempting to try and find a fix once you have invested in the cameras. But how much is the time you are going to spend worth? I kept hoping that the next firmware update from them would magically fix the issues and I have to say that some of the firmware updates did make it better, but never acceptable.
I have to agree with doodah. The green screens are a result of bad H.264 data being sent by the camera. This results in green screens in SecuritySpy because SecuritySpy uses QuickTime for its decompression, and this is what QuickTime does when there is bad/incomplete data. Other decompressors may display black screens, or simply no video for a short time.
Your best bet is to either connect the camera using wired ethernet and lower the frame rate and/or bit rate, or switch to a different camera that is on our list of supported cameras.
Ben, thanks for the response. The camera is not in a critical location and is mounted, so I will just live with it as it was a lark, but will never buy another Foscam.. SS Rocks and would have never guessed it was anything but firmware issues with Foscam. Thanks for the response!
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Bottom line....Foscam is a waste of time and money in my view. If you read all the various posts on this Forum I do not think you can find anyone with kind words about Fiscam. I know it's tempting to try and find a fix once you have invested in the cameras. But how much is the time you are going to spend worth? I kept hoping that the next firmware update from them would magically fix the issues and I have to say that some of the firmware updates did make it better, but never acceptable.
Your best bet is to either connect the camera using wired ethernet and lower the frame rate and/or bit rate, or switch to a different camera that is on our list of supported cameras.