Network Camera Agent Issues

Hello Norman,

sorry I only noticed your Issues now. I was very absorbed with moving the office and now the Windows Mobile GPS Software (http://www.mapwm.com).

I'll check and fix these issues for the next release, somewhere towards the end of January.

Hey, no problem! I completely understand. We are still unpacking here as well. This new Issue Ticket system is nice; I feel encouraged to sit down and write up some more suggestions! (when I get the time to sit that is :-)

Nice software too. If I had a data plan on my Windows Mobile phone, I'd probably be interested in that too!

You don't need a data plan for MapWM - you can record the track on your phone and then upload when connected through a wireless connection or your computer.

Hello Norman,

you may use AbelCam as Agent for another AbelCam installation.

This setup supports PTZ control as outlined in your request.

in this setup, Computer 4) uses AbelCam Cameras on Computer 2) as Agents

I don't think the Network Camera Agent will ever support USB cameras with PTZ - this is implemented in AbelCam.

I do have plans to create Agents to support PTZ IP Cameras, but they will probably be using a different license key.

I tested this on XP with the same Agent version, and everything worked fine. I had no opportunity to test this on Vista - I will look at it later.

Can you have a look at the configuration folder - no traces of license.txt?

Nope!

The license should be in the folder above - what you uploaded is the view of the configuration for Agent 0, but the license is shared for all configured agents

Sorry about that, it appears it is there. That's my key, but it's not loading it.

The installer required that Install Web Content was checked. In the next release this will be changed and the web content checkbox will only be used for AbelCam, not the AbelCam Network Camera Agent.

The wwwroot folder and its content will be installed every time the agent is installed.

Fix...

I found a problem with the Agent registering at AbelCam - it's not using the AbelCam License in the Form, but those stored in the configuration.

Not bad if you know it, irritating if you don't.

Here's a Zip File with a fixed AbelCamNetworkAgent.exe

I can't download that file I get a 404.

Typo - the URL is fixed now.

Is there away to run more than one agent on the same computer? I haven't tried before, not sure if am missing something or if it's to stop people from using agents instead of camera licenses.

Andrew, I've been running 2 agents on one machine for a while now and am still able to do so with this latest licensed version. The "trick" is as follows:

Start first agent with "AbelCamNetworkAgent.exe /config=0"
Start second agent with "AbelCamNetworkAgent.exe /config=1"
and so on up to "AbelCamNetworkAgent.exe /config=9"

After installing the current version I had to play around a while before both agents would register with AbelCam, but this may have been my own error: I can't say for sure that I remembered to save & re-start everything in the right order. After scratching my head for a while and stopping and re-starting the agents a few times everything works okay again.

Stefan,

Minor annoyance: Installing & running the current agent, entering the license, saving & re-starting resulted in my configs being lost.

Ongoing issue: On XP (but not on Win2K) I haven't been able to get either AbelCam or the Agent to capture properly from the Microsoft-supplied driver "Microsoft DV Camcorder and VCR" for a while now. This is the driver that plug-n-play automatically associates with my Sony IEEE-1394 camcorder and my Pyro NTSC/PAL -> 1394 converter box. The issue is that capture framerate is totally erratic regardless of settings, and capture quits completely after a minute or so. Other capture software such as WMCap.exe and ActiveWebcam don't exhibit this problem.

I would like to hear from anybody who is testing with IEEE-1394 DV devices so I can figure out if this is somehow specific to my setup or if it's a legitimate bug report.

Stefan Melvin Andrew :)
Just installed Agent bit late but been at girlfriends but anyway i agree with melvin about the annoyance with the agent when putting the license in it does loose your settings i cant say anything about the IEEE-1394 but i know tv card max out the cpu on the server so i cant use that as an input but as normal now abelcam seams alot more stable than what it used 2 we will see how the new agent goes i need to also update the agent on the wild cam server (server 2003) but i will leave that until i know what its like on the main server

Bit long and properly half don't make sense but hey!!!!

This one is a bit funny on the agent side of thing Got a quickcam web (wildcam) and it says when i press start cam it says its offline???

Sorry only Breif discription on the wildcam problem because had my birthday meal last night so since i have updated to the latest network agent on the wildcam server i now cant get the usb quickcam web to start i realy dont understand this problem if i go back to the old version of the agent it works straight away?

I was just playing around here and tried the current Agent with all my various cams - was not able to duplicate Stewart's issue here. Admittedly I don't have exactly the same cam though. Am I correct that the USB Quickcam in question is being run as a local device (e.g. it's plugged into the same box the Agent runs on)??

Typhoon Cam arrived today. Works fine and aside from the white balance being rather "orangy" it's a pretty nice cam. P/T mechanism is very smooth and quiet compared to my other cams. Based on one *very* preliminary run on the debugger it looks like the PTZ protocol is based on the "standard" KS_PROPERTY ioctls and thus pretty simple to crack. Now if someone would refresh my memory... was it Andrew or Stewart or both who were wanting a Typhoon interface??

Both...... :)

My 9100A just came today after customs lost it for almost 2 weeks. I've setup some php to grab the images but you need to load the that php first before the images are displayed.
Ie.
load cameras.php
cameras.php does a around robin and grabs images from each camera
Making the files img-00.jpg to img-03.jpg
Is there some way abelcam can load that php file each time before it gets an image?

I created a new thread (Issue 181) for Typhoon discussion.

9100A

Andrew, I was looking around for documentation of this device, but I could not find much.

Maybe you can send me your php code, I think this could be implemented in an Agent...

For whatever it's worth...

9100A docs on the manufacturer's site:

http://www.aviosys.com.tw/images/9100(A)%20Plus%20Manual-NB%20-V2.37.pdf

It's in "English" obviously written by Babelfish.

This code looks mighty handy:

http://www.campworld.net/thewiki/pmwiki.php/HWHacking/Aviosys9100

That's the php I was useing, I made this page from it: http://thegeekbox.net/sandbox/cams.html reload the images should update.

I've found a few more issues related to the Agent...

1) Checking the Use Cam checkbox while the Use Server checkbox is un-checked will almost always produce an unhandled exception "thread not started". The exception is being thrown by a Join, but of course I don't know which Join. Debug window record: "Error in CheckBoxCam_CheckedChanged: Thread has not been started."

2) AbelCam gets a bit confused when several Agents connect in a very short time. At least one of them will show "connected" at the Agent but never appear in AbelCam's device list. A good way to see this problem is as follows:

- Set up 2 or 3 sets of Agent configs, each one having Connect at Startup option checked.

- Launch Agent instances for the various configs rapidly (e.g. with a batch file or some desktop shortcuts that can be clicked in rapid succession).

When I encountered this, I was just "speed-launching" my agents from desktop shortcuts after a reboot. AbelCam was running on the same system as the Agents.

Im having general problems with local usb devices on agent did work and now has stoped working just says cam offline the cam is a logitech quickcam messenger which drives wildcam

I should not post when half asleep - lol. I forgot to mention above that Item 1 happens with USB cams but not network cams. Got a feeling it's related to what Stewart is reporting.

I could not reproduce all bugs, tried to fix then anyway...

Issue 182

This version of Agent looks a LOT better than the last one! I have just run thru a fairly fast and simple "tired after work" batch of tests and things are going well. I'll leave it running and play with it more over the weekend.

Agent "pulling" from an AbelCam on the LAN looks like it's working now.

Agent "pulling" from somewhere out on the Internet still works.

Agent using a locally connected camera works (at least with an IEEE-1394 source that appears as Microsoft DV & Camcorder) reasonably well but needs one thing: a way to control the capture framerate. As it is now, it is capturing at 20-some FPS which eats a whole lot of CPU.

The live preview in Agent is nice, but it also eats CPU. I see that minimizing the Agent lowers the CPU load somewhat, but not a lot. Is the preview turned off when minimized? Maybe a checkbox or something is needed to allow turning preview on & off?

When I mentioned preview the other day what I was really thinking of was making AbelCam provide live preview-on-request like it already does with connected cams and web video. I guess this is easier said than done though, since IIRC the live previews in AbelCam are generated by the dreaded OCX.

If anybody is interested in checking it out, here's how I've set up Agents (for now) on my site:

CAM-1 thru CAM-4 are connected to the local machine.

CAM-5 (the pool) is IEEE-1394 plugged into my laptop. "Agent 1" runs on the laptop and talks directly to the 1394 cam - no AbelCam on the laptop. The AbelCam on the server sees the Agent on the laptop as an Agent Device.

CAM-6 is an Agent ("Agent 2") running locally on the server. The Agent pulls video from an outside web site "Scripps KelpCam". It's 17 hops away across the Internet. The AbelCam on the server sees this local Agent as an Agtent Device.

I've been running the agent happily for 17hours. I've noticed that the frame rates jump around quite alot anything from 0.7 to about 2.5. When the agent was displaying 2.5fps the ajax was only show 1.5.

Yes agents seam much more stable and abelcam its self seams alot better as melvin said would like to see a FPS setting for local devices on the agent but i know that seams quite hard sfor stefan to do when i was speaking to him about it anyway i will keep testing and see how it goes...

Melvin other day we were talkin about that typhoon motion cam found this on ebay http://cgi.ebay.com/TYPHOON-CAMERA-MOTION-WEB-CAM-High-Quality-180-Rotation_W0QQitemZ230140219891QQihZ013QQcategoryZ4616QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem
i dont know if thats expensive but i know here we can get them for 28GBP so it wld be intresting if between us we can get one of these working with abelcam?

Stewart, yeah that is certainly more than 28GBP but since I was not able to find a single US distributor I went ahead and ordered one off eBay anyway. No idea yet when it will get here since it's unclear where it is coming from (on eBay it says item is in "London, United States" - since when is London in the US?? lol). The payment went to Israel.

Once it gets here hopefully I will get done with the project at work that's been taking all my time - and then I'll fire up my call tracer & debugger, and see if it's going to be possible to reverse engineer its command set. As Stefan has probably mentioned to you, I've had success with Orbit/Sphere, Creative, and TrackerPod but got stuck on PowerPod-LANC and haven't been able to "crack" it yet.

Back to the main topic... I have had little time to experiment this weekend, but AbelCam nad the Agents have been running nicely without my having to do anything to them. Haven't lost a single camera so far.

Attached a local.dll which will allow to set the refresh rate.

Rename the existing one in the Network Camera Agent folder and copy this one in there. You might have to delete the existing camera.xml before this one can start up - not tested on my end

The new local.dll is working okay here. It isn't causing any problems but unfortunately cutting the framerate down to 5 didn't lower CPU load all that much. It does help some, though.

Uncontrolled -> 65% CPU when minimized. (60% Agent, 5% System) Rate displayed is 13.8 FPS.

5 FPS -> 40% CPU when minimized (35% Agent, 5% System)

Agent is still running fine here after 3days and it's giving a better frame rate from an ipcamera than abelcam on usb one. I'am getting around 80-90% on my cpu with the agent and abelcam running with 3 usb cameras. Also there is a london in ohio or so google tells me. As for my contraption USPS and parcelforce tracking seems to agree it's been lost over the atlantic the past 4days.

That local.dll has made a bit of difference to cpu usage but appart from that these latest releases have been much much better

Progress Info

I have spent a good number of hours today to switch the Agent local cam from dshow.dll to the DirectShowNet library

It took a while to implement everything the standard way, but I am pretty confident that it works the same it did before.

With this library it will be easier to implement future changes, as it's widely used and there are many samples and some documentation. Basically the library is a wrapper for DirectX for .NET (no idea why MS did not do that...)

Preparations for Agent licenses have also reached a good level. The agent will run for 10 minutes with no license. It will not consume a AbelCam license. The Agent License will be around 10 Euros and allow to use as many agents on as many computers as long as they're within the same network (owned by the same person). (Opinions?)

Next steps:

• make local cam usage less cpu intensive
• fix various AbelCam Issues (mostly screen streaming, maybe others)
• create an additional installer for the agent only
• Write / update documentation
• prepare Shop to sell agent licenses
• test release / bug fixes
• final release

Yer this all sounds good stefan i think licences for the agent is also a good idea because at the moment its realy annoying on abelcam i think but appart from that its all still working very smoothly i must admit this release is one of the best so far :)

Couple things I've noticed...

1) Locking the computer causes the Agent to quit capturing from attached IEEE-1394 device. Probably DirectX is having a problem with the context-switching that happens when I ctrl-alt-del to get to the Lock Computer button.

2) If computer "A" has AbelCam running, and computer "B" has only an Agent that's capturing a connected device, I can't seem to get the Agent on B to make the connection to the AbelCam on A. It just pops up a stop-box saying "connection failed". But if I walk over to A and do Add Agent and type in the address of B, that works fine. Computer A's AbelCam serves on port 8080, and in the Agent on B I'm typing in "http://computerA:8080"; for the server address. Am I doing it wrong or is something actually broken?? :-?



2)

Hmmm... I just tried running an Agent with NO caption for the first time and there seems to be a problem.

Agent is on same machine as AbelCam. Agent's Camera can be set to anything valid - doesn't seem to matter what sort of video source is used. Agent is connected to AbelCam, and AbelCam is serving Agent's video as an mjpeg stream.

If Agent's caption is turned ON, all is good.

If Agent's caption is turned OFF, now the streaming Java app pauses for 5+ seconds "connecting to server", pauses for another 5+ seconds on the "loading" graphic, and when the video finally does appear the framerate is something like 1 frame every 15 seconds.

Turning the Agent's caption back ON without making any other changes restores perfectly normal operation.

Weird.

Also, I agree with what Stewart said about licensing. My total number of cameras + agents now exceeds my number of camera licenses, and I'm having the same annoying situation Stewart has spoken of.

Oh, and the Typhoon cam I ordered has shipped - but I found out they shipped it from Israel (???), not London or Ohio or whatever. Going to take a while to get here I think.

Melvin,

the caption issue is resolved in this Next Release

Not sure where the problem with the agent connection is solved. I did some testing, but I ran out of time.

Bug found - see next Release

Initial observations after <1 hour of playing with it...

1) Agent Java Streaming does not work "out of the box". I had to copy the AbelCamstreaming.zip from AbelCam itself into the Agent's wwwroot in order to get the stream test page to work.

2) Agent has various issues specific to Win2K. Not sure if it is supposed to work on 2K or not... if you tell me that it is, I will provide details of the "various issues".

3) Regardless of platform, Agent periodically "gets stuck". It continues to serve up an image or stream, but the image is static (not getting updated from the source, apparently) AND the Agent-generated caption is also static (time in caption not changing).

4) No software zoom capabilities in the Agent? No software (non-driver) zoom in AbelCam for Agent devices?

Yes Melvin i had same problem with java stream also there is a few problems i found with the agent it locks up but i must admit it does keep the web video cameras open without crashing abelcam was talking to stefan on skype yesterday and i was saying about if it would be possible to make an agent which had the usb cabablities built into it so you could have your usb cam running from a different box

also another problem i found with agent is that if you restart abelcam it seams to not reconnect to abelcam and you have to restart the agent

i have 2 agents being used on abelcam at moment one which does go over the internet to abelcam at office and considering its over ADSL it don't disconnect very often..

Stewart, I agree this Agent is a step in a good direction because it doesn't use that buggy OCX and it shields AbelCam from network disconnects and stuff.

I was half asleep when I installed it last night and wrote my post. Planning to do some more testing today and hopefully I can report back with details on the locking up, like maybe what external event makes it happen. Of the 4 things I listed, that's the only one that seems like a significant bug.

I too am trying to use the Agent to connect to another AbelCam but in my setup both AbelCams are on the same LAN inside the same building. I'll admit there's a wireless (plain old 802.11g) segment involved but it's really quite solid so I don't think network dropouts are behind this.

I'm curious about one thing: if I read you right, you have one AbelCam at home that is feeding all the cams to your website. Then you have an AbelCam at the office that has a few cams connected to it. Home AbelCam pulls images from office AbelCam. Am I right? If so, where did you put the Agents? Home box or Office box? Seems they could go either place and I'm not sure I understand which way is right or better.

Okay, I spent some more time today with the Agent. The getting stuck issue seems to be very real and more or less repeatable.

Here's the setup: one machine ("BackEnd") has one IEEE-1394 cam connected to it and is running AbelCam. The second machine ("FrontEnd") has 4 cams connected to it, and also connects to the cam on BackEnd by either Web Video device or, more recently, an Agent. FrontEnd serves pages and all 5 cams to the Web; BackEnd only serves to FrontEnd. I have the Agent running on FrontEnd, thus it is "pulling" from BackEnd's AbelCam.

When I first set up the Agent (and also again today after I deleted its config files and started over) it connected fine to BackEnd's AbelCam (Test obtained an image) and it connected fine to the local AbelCam too. But... the preview in both the Agent and the local AbelCam would only show the "disconnected" graphic. The included Agent test pages showed nothing at all for an image - not even the graphic. Shutting down and re-starting the Agent fixed this.

The bigger issue is that the Agent just quits, usually within a few minutes. Shutting down the Agent and re-starting it gets it going again for a few more minutes. This happens over and over again. With a framerate of 4 it happens almost immediately. With a framerate of 1 it takes a few minutes. Note that this is not a congested network.

When I say "quits" I mean that it stops pulling images from BackEnd, and it serves (directly to test pages and also to AbelCam) a static image; the last one it pulled before it quit. If I configure a time caption in the Agent, that stops changing too.

Debug log from BackEnd shows nothing remarkable; I see the GET requests from the Agent being serviced and then after while there are no more GETs. Nothing unusual looking about the servicing of the last GET. No signs of trouble there.

Debug log from FrontEnd doesn't reveal any problems either. Seems like the Agent is still reponding to AbelCam normally in all ways, except the image and caption are stale.

I couldn't get a debug log from the Agent. Tried changing Debug to 'true' in its config file but that didn't seem to do anythying.

For now I'm not using the Agent anymore since it won't stay running. I don't think I can learn anything more by continuing to try to use it, until I get some suggestions or a new build.

Okay melvin that sort of helps to be honest i havent realy had a big issue with the agent not running or closing down it just seams to lock up when you close abelcam then you restart the agent and it says something is already running on that port...

About where my boxes and abelcam server is the actul box running abelcam is at the office here http://83.167.163.9:8081 and that has one agent running on it driving wildcam which hangs off the end of a 1 1/2 mile wifi link so i would understand for that to disconnect because we all know wifi is not 100% but i also have an agent running on server at home which is where the site is hosted at http://213.165.224.54 (the ip u were tying to find out who it was the other night) there is bedroom cam which runs over adsl and never seams to disconnect hope this helps....

Update Melvin just been playing with abelcam and seams to me that the agent seams to screw up when you close it and try to reopen it but leave it closed for 15-20mins it starts working again i don't have an issue with it connecting to abelcam at the office that works perfect all i have here is a cheep USB cam and a program called YawCam which sort of turns a usb cam into an ipcam then the agent connects to that and sends the image off down the office if that helps

Another problem found i know i have 7 licences and only 6 cams active including agents and it keeps telling me no more licences and keeps popping up when trying to configure the camera but still lets the cameras work very annoying...

Stewart, so that was you I was messing with? Lol! If you'd been coming from your work IP I would have recognized you. Hope I didn't make any rude gestures into the camera at you ;-)

You gave me an idea to try... I was trying to use a copy of AbelCam on "BackEnd" box to make an IEEE-1394 cam act like an IP cam (much like you are using Yawcam). So I shut down that AbelCam and am using something called PySoft Webcam instead. Suddenly the Agent is working much better. So it seems that the issue appears when trying to use an Agent to pull jpegs FROM another AbelCam. As far as the Agent feeding TO the local AbelCam, I haven't had any trouble there besides the things you already reported.

About the licenses: make sure that in the box where you enter the cam licenses there is a carriage return after the last license. I know it that isn't there the last license is not recognized.

Okay I guess I spoke too soon. After working fine for 30 minutes or so, the Agent got stuck - same as before - while I was typing my last post.

Melvin it says i have 7 licences there and ready to go ah ok try yawcam its free just out of intrest

I already tried Yawcam and it gave me trouble right away. Basically, if you close the Preview it stops capturing, and if you leave the Preview open it uses 95% of a P-4 3.0Ghz CPU. I read at their discussion board that others have the same problem. Maybe you are using an older version that doesn't have this problem - think it showed up after ver. 0.2.

BTW - I also got rid of the wireless segment today. Moved the box and plugged it into the wired 100Mb. Made no difference that I can see.

rite ok yes i am using the old version of yaw cam that runs on a P4 2.0ghz here and uses about 20% of cpu but i can see at the moment the pool cam seams to be running quite smooth? is the agent behaving or are you using web video?

Poolcam is on the Agent. The Agent was having a "good period" I guess. Think I must've unplugged you... I was about to try 2 cams on the BackEnd box and pulled a few cables.

Ok i see i hope stefan will iron out some of these problems another thing while on the subject there is a camera that i have found out about which is much like the sphere but much cheap i dont know how hard it would be to get the TPZ to work on abelcam ? http://www.typhoon.de/en/art.php?p=1539

Well, the Agent is doing better but it's still quitting occasionally and it's also not delivering the full 4 FPS I configured it for - even on the LAN.

If I can get my hands on a Typhoon Cam I could tell you pretty quickly what it would take to add its PTZ into the camcontrol dll. But I need to find 1) a US source to buy one from, and 2) time to check it out.

I just had the agent stop for the first time yesterday. My problem is it seems to forget the password for the camera. On a side note I ordered a 9100A AV video server last night importing it from the USA so not going to have till next week. Looks like a cheap way for geting some more IP cameras set up.

Doing even more experimentation with the Agent and I still can not get it to work for more than a couple minutes at a time. This time I took the network completely out of the picture. Tried this on both XP and Win2K - Agent still fails in the same manner on both machines. The setup was:

PySoft Active Webcam: very similar to AbelCam. In this case it was used to make a USB cam (Orbit) look like an IP cam. PySoft was connected to the Orbit, serving on Port 4141.

Agent: getting images from localhost:4141 and serving on Port 3131.

AbelCam: Agent device looking at localhost:3131 and serving on 8080.

All of the above were running on the SAME machine - NO network!

The cam url Test in the Agent retrieves an image from PySoft as expected. However, the preview in the agent just shows the Cam Offline graphic, and all AbelCam gets from the Agent is Cam Offline. Closing and re-starting the Agent made the Agent's preview work right, and also caused the Agent to send a real image to AbelCam.

The PySoft log shows that the Agent is grabbing images as expected. However, the Agent's preview image never changes, and the image it is sending to AbelCam never changes either.

Browsing to the Agent (localhost:3131/index.html) pulls up a page with a stale still-shot displayed. Hitting refresh does not make the stillshot update. The stream test page starts up normally but the image never changes. All this time PySoft is logging "hits" from the Agent.

Browsing to AbelCam instead produces the same results: there is an image that cam from the Agent but it never updates.

I certainly wonder why nobody else is seeing this problem. I have tried different computers, different video sources, different network configurations, etc. and yet the Agent quite consistently does not work. The only thing I haven't tried is a real IP camera - because I don;t have one.

I'm now getting the same problem but it only started after my last post before that, it was running fine. Do the username and password feilds show a blank under "Cam URL" if you open it agian, after entering one. I'm not sure if it's ment or not.

I'm not using the authentication here - my video devices are "open" while testing. However... I just tried putting in a username and password to see what happens. Yes, they vanished as soon as I closed and re-opened the Cam URL dialog. But they ARE getting saved in config.xml so this would appear to be a just a GUI problem.

Ah,I nerver thought of looking in the config... Maybe the soctish weather had something to do with it, it rained the day the agent first gave up. Maybe the camera had shut down.I'll trying turning it on and off see if can repeat what happened.

That worked in away; the first time when I turned it off I was watching in via the ajax and it came back almost as soon as I turned it back on. This time I didn't have it open but after a minuite or so it did start streaming agian so that idea is out the window.

Meanwhile, here in CA things are getting stranger and stranger...

All my various Agent experiments so far have used video sources located within this building. So now I tried an "outside" source that's 17 hops away across the Internet. Should be even more troublesome, right? Well, actually it is working quite well. The Agent hasn't died yet and I've been running it for about an hour now.

I see two things that don't seem quite right:

1) At 4 FPS the stream is jerky and it's dropping frames. This is not the fault of the off-site image source. When I connect to the source directly with a browser it easily delivers 8 - 10 FPS of very smooth video, using simple java script "jpeg reloading" (same way the AbelCam java script streamin works).

2) The Agent-fed stream from AbelCam to the client browser stops after a while but the Agent does not actually die. Reloading the page in the browser starts the stream back up. This is happening when mjpg streaming with the Java applet. It almost seems like either AbelCam or the Agent is enforcing a Max Frames limit.

The Agent is CAM-6 on my Control Stuff site, if anybody wants to play with it.

The image source is here: http://www.camzone.com/ click the "Scripps KelpCam" button on the left. Best to use a browser that doesn't have Flash 8 installed because if the site detects Flash it goes into some FLV Streaming mode (not a good test) but if it doesn't detect Flash it will do plain old java script streaming.

When I tried you stream I got a frame then it paused then a great rush of 3 or 4. Might be because am 6,000 miles odd miles away (coming your way in summer holidays nice 11hour flight..) but from camzone using be its the flash streaming I get I'd guess around 0.5fps but they are steady.

Melvin Andrew this is what i found with the agent because my bedroom cam is at home and thats hosted on adsl it seams more reliable than the wildcam which is local only on a long wifi link i mean its only 4-5 hops from office to here over internet but only 2wifi hops for wildcam i dont understand this and yes melvin your cams pause for a moment then start up again

Image update: the remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthoized
That's what I'm getting now, I've run out of camera licences. So I can't try with anything else at the moment.

For good messure: Image Update: The server committed a protocol violation. Section=sponseSatusline but this time the camera is still updateing.

Also another thing which would be nice if it worked again would be the java streams ?

Wow what an engaged discussion.

While I was reading all this, I was busy working on an improved version.

I hope to be abel to release it later today.

Next Version available, see Issue 177

Bugs found

• no AutoUpdate for Agent when listed
• /current.jpg does not default to an active camera
• Camera number for agents not transferred correctly to server when listed

I will provide a fix as fast as possible...

See Issue 176

I get the error below when trying to install.

this is an uninstall error of the previously installed version, that should not hurt.

The same Web Video problem (last described in 173) just happened again with the 4223 OCX. Short debug log attached, showing what happens when trying to start the failed device back up.

Does removing and readding the cam help, or do you have to shutdown the program and restart?

Time to write a Network Camera Agent :-)

Don't know if remove/re-add will help - haven't tried it in a long time. I will try it next time and report.

Yes, this OCX has got to go! ;-)

I see you released it to the masses, so perhaps it is too late to be reporting this...

Today I had a genuine loss of Web Video devices - problem on the network. What was strange was that AbelCam didn't give up after X restart attemts. Instead, I found it showing "-131 restart attempts remaining", it was still trying, and the GUI was super slow.

Web Video issue i now have is that it has disconnected from the device but dont tell you it has and just keeps the cam open but the image dosent update just stays the same

If you are tired of hearing about the OCX, you may want to ignore this post... ;-)

"CAM-5" on my site is on an IEEE-1394 interface, appears as "Microsoft DV Camera & VCR" in Windows. Normally this device is hooked up to my "back end" server (Win2K) and AbelCam handles it just fine. But now I have connected it to my main server (XP) and there are capture problems. The device and the port are fine - using WMCAP the video stream looks smooth and totally normal. But with AbelCam (live previews as well as mjpg stream to browser) the motion is jerky and awful. It will "get stuck" for several seconds, then give a burst of frames, then stick again for a while...

This is definitely a capture issue, since the time in the caption is changing smoothly even when the video is stuck. I tried downgrading to a few different versions with older OCX builds - no effect. I'm trying to run it at 4 FPS but have tried 1 FPS, 8 FPS, etc. - no effect.

When my ipcamera goes offline now instead of showing the offline jpeg abelcam shows the image from webcam 1. Does the same if any of the USB cameras die. I'll put on debugger for next time it happens see if anything useful comes out of that.

Same that happens to me andrew...

Here this is what i get that second one which is showing the PTZ should be Wildcam

Cam 2 (Wildcam) was not active when that shot was taken. -> AbelCam delivers the first active camera (cam 0)

To display active cameras only on your external server, you'll have to use some scripting to read the active cameras first.