"No signal" on a few Cams - but they work fine

[LTek]

I have 11 cams, all 1080p, all have very strong Wifi signals as routers are no farther than 20ft from any of them.

I frequently have a problem where up to 4 of them show "No signal" even though other apps connect to them just fine. The issue is with many of the cams, not always the same ones.

Restarting BI and wifi routers doesn't help. The cams magically work again after several hours, sometimes it takes a day.

For example, yesterday all the cams were working until the evening when 3 cams then showed No Signal. I could still connect to them with an Android app just fine. I rebooted BI a few times and also the Wifi router. This morning 1 of those cams now works fine in BI, the other 2 and a new 1 shows No Signal ... so 8 work fine, 3 are No Signal.

any ideas?

 

[awsum140]

Ditch WiFi and install some CAT cable.

 

[lifeatredline]

When the cameras android app connects and shows video (streaming not frozen image) and blue iris shows no signal, check the actual camera ip address (use nmap or fing or other lan scanner) vs the ip address that blue iris is configured to use for that camera. All ip cameras whether wired or wireless should either have their address reserved in the router so it does not change, or dhcp in the camera disabled and a static ip set in the camera (preferably outside the subnets router dhcp range such as 192.168.1.5 when dhcp range is 192.168.1.20-254 in the router for example. The thing with the cloud p2p cameras is the oem app is going to see the camera so long as it has an internet connection whether it is on your subnet at your house or across town on another network. Blue iris can only stream the video if the cameras ip address is the address entered in the video config tab. That being said, I have encountered wifi (and wired) cams which have their mac address tied to an ip reserved in the router dhcp pool so it does not change..............change. Should it happen? NO! Has it? Yes!. I'm blaming a bug in Asus firmware (my edgerouter systems never do it), but none the less, compare your ip addresses when the oem camera app streams fine and blue iris shows no signal after it had been working in blue iris and stopped.

It should also be said that an inherant problem with wifi cameras is packet loss, which can happen no matter how strong your signal is on each end or how close the camera is to the router, which causes the data to be retransmitted by the camera until it is received properly. While this is happening, frame rate will reduce as the data stream slows to allow for sending the same data multiple times. This causes an increase in network traffic, which further exacerbates the problem of wifi saturation in your operating area and causes other cameras with marginal operation to fail as well. En essence it is a cascade effect where several wifi devices experience massive packet loss at once and either freeze your video image or lose it altogether.

As everyone else will tell you, wifi for cams can never be considered reliable or trustworthy as even if you achieve good uptime, they can all be knocked offline by a thief.

That said, you mention router(s) plural, so Im assuming you have them on different channels such as 1,6,11 and have bandwidth set to 20mhz and cameras divided up among them as equal as possible.

 

[SouthernYankee]

You may be overload your wifi network. All these cameras are on a 2.4 GHZ network. Calculate and check your network load. Most wifi cameras have a cheap implementation of wifi with a low throughput.

If you must used wifi you will need to set up access points using different SSID and a different channels to spread out the load. Assign the cameras to different SSID.


On a security note it is child's play to block wifi. So if you are trying to protect anything of value using wifi forget it.

 

[LTek]

Ditch WiFi and install some CAT cable.

Will do soon as you be over to, for free, run CAT in the walls and do the patch repairs. Should only take you about 2 days of work. Dont worry, I'll buy the cams I need since I wont be able to use the ones I have.

You may be overload your wifi network. All these cameras are on a 2.4 GHZ network. Calculate and check your network load. Most wifi cameras have a cheap implementation of wifi with a low throughput. If you must used wifi you will need to set up access points using different SSID and a different channels to spread out the load. Assign the cameras to different SSID.
On a security note it is child's play to block wifi. So if you are trying to protect anything of value using wifi forget it.

I have 3 different routers (all on diff channels) and the cams run across both 5GHz & 2.4Ghz and I've tried both... I have almost zero 2.4Ghz interference from neighbors (they are pretty far) and no overlap on 5Ghz. I also run only a few devices on Wifi and most are sleeping or shut off 90% of the time. All tablets/phones run on 5Ghz and the cams are mostly on 2.4Ghz

Its very odd. I'll play some more. thx

 

[fenderman]

Will do soon as you be over to, for free, run CAT in the walls and do the patch repairs. Should only take you about 2 days of work. Dont worry, I'll buy the cams I need since I wont be able to use the ones I have.

The alternative is to dick around with unusable wifi. Bite the bullet and run cable.

 

[awsum140]

Use subpar equipment and you'll get subpar results. Being too lazy or unskilled to run some wire is you're choice. I'm 70 and manage to be able to run all my own wiring working alone.

 

[LTek]

you guys didnt really read my post completely... "I frequently have a problem where up to 4 of them show "No signal" even though other apps connect to them just fine."

all 11 cams work fine and... BI 'disconnects' while other apps (the native samsung app that requires the internet) connect to the cams perfectly when BI doesn't. Thus the issue is not the cams or Wifi connectivity. I suspect something with BI or something in pathing/routing between my 3 ASUS routers (they split the load of the cams)

 

[fenderman]

you guys didnt really read my post completely... "I frequently have a problem where up to 4 of them show "No signal" even though other apps connect to them just fine."

all 11 cams work fine and... BI 'disconnects' while other apps (the native samsung app that requires the internet) connect to the cams perfectly when BI doesn't. Thus the issue is not the cams or Wifi connectivity. I suspect something with BI or something in pathing/routing between my 3 ASUS routers (they split the load of the cams)

This is because the native app uses different protocols not rtsp. Your issue is 100 percent due to wifi, you can confirm this by wiring up the cameras with short cables at the using a switch at the pc.

 

[NoloC]

we've actually seen this complaint on the forum many times. And the poster is usually hard to convince since apps that don't use rtsp seem to work fine as @fenderman points out.

While it seems odd to you, we see it as expected behavior due to wifi. You can verify with VLC which will use rtsp.

You might try powerline devices if you won't run wires. Still flaky but not as flaky as a wifi connection.

 

[Ssayer]

Just can't stress this enough...