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[jonleo]

I just bought a DCS-930L and set it up to give a picture of my yard - mostly for fun and a bit for other purposes ..

Anyway, I have a 3G internet connection with traffic limited to 20Gb a month. I have a strong feeling that my network camera is using a good part of this. I see that I can set the fps and image quality down to a minimum but the fps stops at 1 .. so lets say, what if I only need the picture updated every 10 minutes? That I think would lower the network traffic a lot - is there any way to do this?



EDIT:
The easier question from a networking rookie - does the camera stream pictures/video live at all times to some online server or whatever, or does this (network traffic on my home DSL connection) occur only when/if someone logs on to mydlink.com and view the picture?

[JakobR]

You can change the setting from frames per second to seconds per frame. I've set it to 600 s, ie ftp an image every 10 minutes.

[jonleo]

Hm, how do you do that? I dont see that option at my "https://192.168.1.104/setSystemStream" page - is there any other software which is more useful?

(I dont want it to upload anything to a server or ftp thingy, I just want to log on online (like mydlink.com) now and then and take a look at the rl picture - but I dont need it to stream a video-ish stream, just update the picture every 10 or 15 minutes or so..)


EDIT
Oh, now I see - its in the ftp/upload settings. Well, thats not exactly what Im thinking about, but thanks anyway

[JakobR]

What are you trying do achieve, ie what application is viewing the images?

[jonleo]

So far I am only watching what I would call live video on mydlink.com and mydlink iphone app.

[larkim]

To answer your simple question the camera won't use any (much - some tony amount of polling data I think) internet traffic when it is just sitting there and you haven't logged on to the camera via mydlink.com or via your iPhone.  Its not sat there all the time streaming images to the internet just waiting for you to watch.

Under the /video.htm page (probably in your case 192.168.1.104/video.htm) you can set the resolution of the images and the FPS (between 1 - 30).  I've got mine set up with a similar intention - just the odd glance into my house when I can be bothered, nothing fancy.

I did leave my mobile set to watch the home streaming for a bit when I first got it - and got a warning letter from my mobile broadband provider about data usage :-)

If my maths is right, if it was streaming permanently at the bit rates I'm using (320x240 resolution, about 10fps over my broadband, which generates an 8KB image for every frame) daily use would be:-
8kilobytes = 64kilobits x 10fps x 60secs x 60mins x 24hours = 55,296,000 kilobits in a day (over 52 gigabytes of data transfer), so every user would be swamping their broadband every month!!

Hope this helps!

Matt

[jonleo]

Yes, thats excactly the answer I was hoping for, and of course when you do the math its obvious. I should have had my DSL connection shut down within 3 hours or something like that if that was the reality.

The resolution is set to 1 fps for video and right now I have ftp upload of pictures every 600 seconds and that doesnt seem to generate very much data traffic.

Well, thanks a lot

[JavaLawyer]

This following dosn'tt relate specifically to the DCS-930L, but is interesting in the context of discussing broadband traffic. For cameras supporting Night Mode, leaving the camera in night mode will render a black and white video stream which uses only a fraction of the bandwidth of a similarly sized color stream.