Poor Performance

[millenios]

Hi, I am running the 2 camera version of Sighthound all updates installed, I have one camera a Logitech C905webcam running at 1280 x 720, hardware is a home server running 2012 essentials R2 with 16Gb of ram - AMD 8350 8 core processor.This is a media/back up server so never really see the processor usage go much beyond 15-20%. The problem is recordings seem very jerky missed frames etc. Is this a limitation of the software? When the webcam is plugged directly into a PC the picture quality is fantastic.. Any suggestions, I have been considering getting a better webcam but suspect this won't help. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

[Semper Vaporo]

Have you tried connecting the camera using a different USB socket on the PC? It is possible that the socket it is on now is on the same USB Host Controller that some other device is using (such as the harddrive) and Host Controller's bandwidth is overloaded.

Try more than one different socket, too! Just because the sockets are widely separated (one on the front and one on the back) is no indicator as to which Host Controller they are on.

I hope this helps... if not then more info about the computer hardware (peripherals as well as internals) and software (OS and background tasks) might be helpful in troubleshooting the problem. An 8-core processor should be yawning from boredom at the load from a 2 camera Sighthound system.

[tesla8er]

Did you set the resolution at 1280 x 720 when you added the webcam? The default is 320 x 240. If so, try a lower resolution and see if the jerkiness goes away. If it does, see the post above about not overloading the USB controller on the computer.

[millenios]

Hi Thanks for the response,

I have tried various ports on the back of the motherboard which seems makes no difference (there are no other USB devices connected to the PC/server)just the one camera. I am reluctant to drop the res as this camera is at the front of the house & as such I want to have very smooth clear images captured. The cam has it's own dedicated 2Tb Sata3 drive plenty of processor bandwidth (again checked last night it's a 4Ghz 8 core processor which while "busy" was running cocked down to 1.2Ghz at 8%)Ironically things seem to have got worse after the last 2.3 update, & as an aside the auto white balance of the camera which let me see surprisingly well at night also seems to have failed(just more or less black screen, I have 3 or these cams so have tried replacing but all the same.

Thanks.

[tesla8er]

Are you looking at the live view or the clips view? Desktop app or browser? If browser is it still jerky when clicking on the full live feed? (the overview page is necessarily stills every 2 seconds - click the image to get the live feed). I suggested lowering the resolution as a test, just to help isolate the problem. There should be no issues with anything you are trying to do. Some people have 20 720 cameras on a machine like yours.

[Semper Vaporo]

Consternations!

Sorry for the consecutive questions that might be useless if the 1st one produces a negative result... Troubleshooting via long-distance is frustrating sometimes. I don't know your computer expertise and I may suggest things that you have already tried and proved to be innocent of the trouble, but I am blue-skying here trying to guess possible causes. If I were sitting at the computer keyboard, these are things that I might check to see what might be happening.

You say the camera works fine on another PC. What software did you use there to view the camera's output? Have you tried the same software on the PC in question, too? Was it Sighthound on both? If it was, try using something else (like "AMCap" maybe) on the home server PC to see if it shows jerky video, too (just be aware that few USB cam drivers allow more than one program to access the camera simultaneously, so you will have to have it turned off in Sighthound when trying another program).

Do the two computers have the OS? Same drivers loaded? What else might be different?

There can be other devices internal to the PC that are connected to the USB hardware... Keyboard, Mouse, SD and other memory chip readers, etc. including hard drives and optical drives... it is conceivable that one of those is not working right and has the Host Controller stuck in a loop of some sort and chewing up the available I/O bandwidth. Or even one of the Host Controllers could be bad and doing the same thing.

You say that the CPU usage is not high, meaning the CPU should have plenty of time to process the data without losing frames. I assume that info is from Task Manager's display. Have you monitored the "Processes" tab for what processes are busiest? Be sure to click the button at the bottom of the window for "Show Processes from All Users". Also, click the "CPU" column to sort the list by which programs are using the CPU the most (consecutive clicks on a column header will reverse the sort). You might also select to display other columns of info by clicking on the "View" menu and selecting "Select Columns...", this will present a dozen options that can be added to the displayed data... I often monitor "I/O Read Bytes", "I/O Write Bytes" and "I/O Other Bytes".

You might also monitor the "Network" tab and add columns (via the "View" menu "Select Columns..." entry) for various I/O counts (Bytes, Unicasts, non-Unicasts, etc.). This might show that the network connection is consuming I/O bandwidth that is using up the internal data bus bandwidth and interfering with the Camera's data on the internal bus.

And it could very well be that I am way down the garden path to the septic field and nowhere near what the real problem is. I just cannot think of what might cause the camera to not be working perfectly on the PC as you have described it.

[millenios]

Hi Thanks for the suggestions etc.

I have simply re-installed the sighthound software and reduced the res to 640 x 480. This has improved things slightly but still not smooth.
I only really use sighthound in it's simplest form using motion capture which I review by remote desktop into the server (dual gigabit) so will try Yawcam or Logitech's own software and see if it makes any difference.
I am a little disappointed as the key reason I brought the product was for the higher res.

Thanks

[ryan]

Hi millenios,

When you are in the monitor view do you see any warning icons next to the live view of your camera?

If you would like to submit a bug report from inside the application via "Help->Report a Problem" we'd be happy to take a look and see if anything odd is occurring internally to the application.

Best,
- ryan