Question about bandwidth use

aldonc

Hi, I have 2 cameras at a house under construction and am monitoring them with SS at a different house. I am trying to figure out if/when I'm going to hit data caps with my ISP on either end.

I have both cameras created twice in SS so I can set different schedules for time lapse capturing and motion detect. I have seen in other threads that a camera is being received whether it's Active or Passive. In my case, does this mean that SS is receiving 4 streams for these cameras or only 2 and duplicating within the app?

I would prefer to keep SS and the cameras at different houses since that's where a NAS is that is capturing this (and for security reasons) but I don't want surprises from my ISP.

Thanks,
Aldon

Ben

Hi Aldon,

If the two instances are set up with exactly the same settings in the Video Device Settings window, then you will get only one actual video stream being transmitted between the two locations for each camera (SecuritySpy will detect that they are the same and share one stream between both instances).

If the cameras can stream H.264 video, then use this (over JPEG or MPEG-4) as this offers the lowest bandwidth. You will also want to limit the frame rate and make sure the compression quality is not set too high, to make sure the streams are not consuming too much bandwidth.

Hope this helps.

aldonc

Hi Ben,
Good to hear the streams won't get duplicated since the copies are identical to the original. I've been slowly lowering resolution and frame rates to try to minimize this but thanks for the additional pointers.
Aldon