I've been looking for a camera that supports RTSP/RTP protocols with MPEG4 streams, and according to the info on D-Link's sites and in the manuals, the DCS-2132L does so.
So I purchased one at Fry's this weekend and hooked it up.
I'm not trying to use it with the cloud - I simply need it for direct streaming (to test client-side software).
First, for some context, I installed the latest firmware update, and I'm using this on a MacBook Pro where I run Windows 7 inside of a VMWare 6 virtual machine. So I can access the camera both from the Mac OS X side and Win & side. I'm able to run Safari (OS X only), Chrome, Firefox and IE (Win 7 only).
I encountered three problems.
1) In browsers on the Mac side, it's not able to show the video using Quicktime. It tries to load up Quicktime and just sits there forever showing it loading. It never shows a video. The little preview box in the lower-left corner DOES, however, show a video image. Within the Win 7 environment, it DOES load up Quicktime and display a video image. There should be an option that lets you select which app you want to use to view the stream with, rather than defaulting to whatever it finds. I've got two different versions of QuickTime installed, and it's probably selecting the older one.
2) The manual says (and shows) that there are three video modes" H.264, MJPEG, and MPEG4. When I access the camera, regardless of which browser or environment I'm using, I only see two options in the drop-downs: H.264 and MJPEG. MPEG4 is NOT present. That's the one I need. I cannot find any way to enable it.
3) There are three profiles in the video setup page. However, the 3rd profile is disabled and there's no apparent way to enable it. There's no explanation anywhere. However, the rest of the setup pages all seem to assume there ARE three profiles, and you can even select profile #3 from the main live feed page. You just cannot change any of the settings for it on the page where you should be able to do so.
If I cannot get MPEG4 to work with this shortly, it's going back.
(Also, it's odd that, after reading a bazillion RFCs that document streaming video, they pretty much all say that H.264 video streams are supposed to be MPEG4 with AAC audio encoding by default. The D-Link cameras that support H.264 all use MJPEG and some other audio encoding scheme, and the supposed "defaults" aren't even supported when they ARE listed in the product specs! This is especially odd because the camera settings specifically distinguish between H.264 and MJPEG in the setup screens. What's the difference? When I sniff the raw data streams, the H.264 data is also tagged as an MJPEG data stream. It would be nice if the product specs explained this.)
Author
Topic: Problems with new camera (Read 2895 times)