Trouble streaming video via Android App

[optimusfan]

I installed the Android app on my phone this morning and am having some trouble. I am able to see my cameras listed under "All Cameras" just fine, but when I select one to view the current video stream, the app hangs with the loading spinning circle icon. Eventually it times out with the following error: "Stream Load Error. The camera stream could not be loaded."

The app works correctly on my HP Touchpad running Cyanogenmod 9 and via a web browser, so it appears as though my router is configured correctly. My phone is a rooted Galaxy S3 running Android 4.1.2.

Please let me know if you need any further details.

[ryan]

Hi optimusfan,

Two people here use the Galaxy S3 without trouble (though one is running Android 4.3, the other person isn't around for me to ask at the moment). The video streaming in the application on Android 4.0 and up uses h264 and HLS rather than jpegs for improved image quality and drastically decreased bandwidth. It sounds like perhaps something has been damaged or removed with the video codecs on your device. Have you installed a custom ROM on the Galaxy S3? I'm unsure what actions your modifications you took/made when rooting your phone.

[optimusfan]

No ROM modifications. Still running stock 4.1.2 that came with the phone.

[ryan]

Thanks for the update. For video playback, we hand the URL to the video playback control in Android, things are unfortunately out of our hands at that point. Your device and android version should support h264 and HLS, but it evidently is having trouble for some reason. We'll need to look into potential manual fallback options in the future. In the meantime, if you can upgrade your OS version that may help as our S3 devices are working properly (I believe were on a version earlier as well (4.2?) but I don't recall for certain when the 4.3 upgrade was released).

[optimusfan]

OK, good news. I finally updated my phone to 4.3 and the app started streaming the video. I then re-rooted and it is still streaming content. So, we should be good there.


Follow-up question: should I be able to enable / disable any of my cameras via the app at any time, or will it only work if there is also a matching rule that would otherwise be active? It appears to be the latter, but it would be nice to enable / disable the entire system at any time from my phone without having to have 24x7 rule already set up.

Basically, I want to be able to remotely arm my system, and it doesn't appear as though I can do that from the app right now.

[ryan]

Glad to hear you got things working!

Sighthound Video has an 'enabled' and 'disabled' state for cameras. If a camera is "enabled" it will record if any scheduled rules exist, there isn't currently a way to force recording if no rule is enabled (most people would be unhappy if their camera started recording when they had explicitly set it up not to).

Going forward we hope to expose more functionality in the remote applications, such as enabling and disabling specific rules as you can in the desktop app. Additionally a good feature request that's been brought up is to have different groups of rules, to allow for "home", "work", "vacation", etc... That would allow you to have one for "all on, 24 hr," type.

If I misunderstood your question or can clarify anything else let me know.

[optimusfan]

Yup, I think that's perfect. Per your example I do have a disabled rule that's 24x7, but as you noted I also don't want to have that rule enabled all the time. It sounds like adding the ability to enable / disable rules would allow me to do what I want to do. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks.