How can I check the camera RTSP streaming status in advance?

Description

Mainly purpose for this article is to guide you on how to check the camera RTSP streaming status while you are able to get the RTSP streaming connected via VLC player. Sometimes, the issue might also be caused by your PC performance or camera performance. So, in this article, it has been mainly focused on using VLC player. And first of all, you've already been able to get the camera RTSP streaming connected successfully with VLC player. But you've been suspecting (or you'd confirmed) about something is wrong at the camera side (like grey-out images, broken images, freeze images and so on). And you'd wanted to figure it out on what's possibly going on accordingly. We provide you with some useful procedures shown below for your reference.

Index

1.  Connect camera RTSP streaming using VLC

2.  Broken image, freeze image or grayed-out image problem

    2-1.  Seeing missing frames shown in VLC "Debug" mode

        2-1-1.  Check PC performance

        2-1-2.  Check network performance

        2-1-3.  Check camera performance

            2-1-3-1.  Disable camera multiple profiles

            2-1-3-2.  Change using MJPEG codec

        2-1-4.  Contact camera vendor

    2-2.  Contact us

Solution

1.  Execute VLC player and connect camera RTSP streaming using its RTSP URL. When connecting camera RTSP streaming using VLC Player, you would possibly meet some scenarios.

2.  Any broken image, freeze image or grayed-out image shown occasionally or constantly.

    2-1.  In this case, please enable VLC Player to show "Debug" messages for further investigation. You can go to "Tool" - "Messages". Click on "Messages".

    A message window will pop up. Select "2 (debug)" in "Verbosity". Any message caught will show up in here.

    When you see any messages shown in below, this means some frames had been missed or received too late by the VLC Player.

    "picture is too late to be displayed"

    "cannot decode one frame"

    "picture might be displayed late"

        2-1-1.  Please check first your PC performance is enough to decode the RTSP streaming. To check this, simply right click on Windows "Taskbar" and run "Task Manager". Go to "Performance" tab and check if the CPU Usage had reached 100% or not. If it reached 100%, please change another PC with better specification in order to decode the camera RTSP streaming better.

        2-1-2.  Secondly, please check again your network performance capability. The RTSP streaming packets might be lost with limited network bandwidth or network performance. To check the network performance, you can refer to the procedures shown below.

How can I use ping command to check camera accessibility?

        2-1-3.  Otherwise, please check the camera performance. When the camera performance has been consumed a lot, RTSP streaming frames might have trouble sending out. There are some camera troubleshooting procedures that you can try. Please see below.

            2-1-3-1.  You can disable camera multiple profiles and reduce the camera profile usage down to only one. With less stream profile enabled and allowed, the camera performance might be reduced. Please be noticed that not every camera is able to set and change the camera multi profile settings. To achieve this, please consult this request with the camera vendor and login to camera webpage to complete the settings accordingly. After done the settings re-adjustment, please try again to receive the RTSP streaming using VLC player. Check if there is still any broken image, freeze image or grayed-out image shown occasionally or constantly.

            2-1-3-2.  You can change the encoding codec to use MJPEG for related camera profile. By using MJPEG codec, it requires less camera processor performance in comparison to MPEG4/H.264/H.265 codec. This approach might possibly reduce and save some camera processor performance too. To see if the camera supports MJPEG codec or not, please be so kind to consult with camera vendor about this. After done the settings re-adjustment, please try again to receive the RTSP streaming using VLC player. Check if there is still any broken image, freeze image or grayed-out image shown occasionally or constantly.

        2-1-4.  Otherwise, please contact the camera vendor about this information for any further investigation accordingly.

    2-2.  Otherwise, if you didn't discover any issue regarding broken image, freeze image or grayed-out image, please kindly send an email to [e-mail] with the following information:

• Provide full network topology diagram.
• Provide IP camera's information (model and FW version) and parameters (video format [H.264 / MPEG4 / MJPEG], resolution, fps, etc.) of each channel.
• Provide NUUO product model name.
• Provide firmware version of NUUO product.
• Provide DevicePack version of NUUO product.
• Describe how to duplicate the issue in detail and the roughly frequency the issue is happening.
• Provide a TeamViewer session to us if possible. Our available time is from 10:00AM to 6:00PM at Taiwan local time (GMT+8) from Monday to Friday.