Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Linksys Cameras and Live Cams

Many Linksys (now Cisco) devices are supported in Live Cams. Fairly often the owners of WVC models struggle with loading them into the application. This is because they can only stream a single format of video at a time, as opposed to most dual-streaming cameras that are on the market today.

For example, a recent app review by "jaspman" in the United States claims that the application does not work and simply crashes his iPad. I suspect that he needs to change the output mode of his Linksys camera to JPEG (MJPEG) so that Live Cams can decode the video stream. Certainly the lockups are a defect and should not be happening if the camera is sending MPEG4 instead, but the app will work fine if the camera sends a properly formatted MJPEG or JPEG stream.

As always, I recommend that my users contact me via support@barryegerter.com before jumping to conclusions (or giving up) with camera configuration. Every camera model and firmware release has its own quirks and this can often be frustrating when integrating with third party applications like Live Cams. We are here to help, and would like the opportunity to assist you before you write a negative review about the software!