Welcome back
@EMPIRETECANDY - LOL was that fireworks video taken with one of your camera's?!? ;-)
Since you said you are
"going back to work", can I "ping" 'ya with some software bugs that I think should be easy to fix?
They are repeatable on both of my T54IR-ZE-S3's ... and I suspect exist on other cameras using the same code base.
I'm happy to be a Beta tester for any/all of these - they are very easy for me to duplicate.
1.
As outlined in this thread, the API Snapshot quality is MUCH worse than Web Snapshots - blocky artifacts in shadows plus overall lightening - far more than expected from jpeg compression and waayyy worse than Hikvision. Hopefully someone knowledgeable may take a quick look at the code (using GD library?) and (hopefully) easily see the boo-boo that is causing such a degradation in quality. Darn shame, because the camera lens/sensor/etc. is quite capable. Bonus points if your programmer can add an option (as other vendors do) to specify quality and resolution when requesting snapshot.cgi
UPDATE that it appears the API Snapshot JPEG is compressing the dynamic range by boosting the shadows and knocking down the highlights. I'll point out that Hikvision has a Grey Scale option (Image->Image Enhancement) where you can choose the range of the grey scale as [0-255] or [16-235] ... the later is what seems to be happening.
2. This should be super-easy.
As outlined in this thread, everytime you access the camera via the web interface, you get hit with a request to open WebSockerServer23450.exe, which gets a bit tiring/annoying to always have to say Cancel. Hikvision has an option to turn this off - be awesome if that was added.
3. Hopefully a quick fix to this one too.
As outlined in this thread, it appears if you download the videos files directly from camera via web interface WITHOUT installing the plug-in, the rate seems to be capped at
TEN Mbps ... like EXACTLY 10Mbps ... which suggests a software limit. Whereas with the plug-in installed, I get close to the full rated 100Mbps ... so it's a solid network connection and the camera is capable. BTW, hats off to Dahua with their Web 5.0 interface that doesn't require all that plug-in crap ... plus works well in a a variety of browsers (IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox) as most things appear doable.
4. Finally, this one might be a bit trickier to figure out. I have a program that every second, uses the API call to pull a JPEG via snapshot.cgi for time-lapse purposes. It
usually takes between 0.5-1.0 seconds (the program "sleeps" the difference before grabbing the next image) ... but periodically, it will take 1-2 seconds ... or even longer. I have a Hikvision using the same program, same network (actually same PoE switch!) and it almost always takes about 0.4 seconds to pull a similar size JPEG. Yes, I even tried switching network cables and no difference (plus see #3 above - the Dahua is delivering 100Mbps). Both are using "Digest Authentication" ... but there is "something" about the Dahua that takes noticeably longer, plus has greater variance. Similar to #1, I bet if someone knowledgeable looked at the internal code, they would see some sort of delay in the network handshake. Or possibly related to #1, albeit generating a JPEG internally from the stream should be pretty quick.
P.S. I don't mean to "dump" on you Andy - just trying to provide some constructive feedback to help improve a nice camera.
Let me know if there are more appropriate avenues to report these issues.
TIA! ;-)
