Hikvision optimal setting

[Eric Meister]

Is there a way to go back and set the optimal camera setting after Camect is already activated. I had skipped during installation. One of my Hikvision cameras video quality looks bad in Camect and no matter what settings I change it doesn't seem to look better.

[CamectArup]

tIn order to diagnose this, try exporting a video clip and playing it with an external video player. If that looks good, then we'll know you're disliking the quality of the playback through Camect rather than the video coming from the camera. 

You didn't mention whether the problem appears to be low resolution, low frame rate, or perhaps both. Here are a few thoughts: 

In the multiple-camera view, the resolution of the cameras is limited. You can view at higher resolution by using the single camera view, which you get by using the "pop-out" icon at the top right of the camera title bar. If the resolution is high enough, you may have to click a second time to get to full resolution. From the multiple-camera view on platforms other than iOS, you can also double-click to get a full-screen view that switches to high-res. 

If the frame rate seems low, that may be due to the limits of what your device can process. However, it can also be due to limits on the network between Camect and your viewing device, or due to what we estimate as the amount of data that can safely be sent to your device w/o overloading it. 

Lastly, if webRTC is failing to make a direct connection, your quality will also be limited. In that case, you'll see a "cloud" icon near the top left of the camera overlay, and it may be worth trying to understand what about your network is causing the direct connection to fail. 

[Eric Meister]

Sorry for not providing additional info. The issue is with resolution on the pop out view in Camect. The resolution on video looks clear exported from the camera. I have 6 Hikvision cameras with the following resolutions 2304 x 1296,
2048 x 1536,1920 x 1080, 1920 x 1080,1280 x 960, and 1920 x 1080. The camera that seems to have lower resolution is set to 1920 x 1080. The resolution is not unusable just doesn't look as great as the other 1080p and gets the most false identification(alerting people as cat, or dog as deer) I submitted some of the examples from alerts to help the AI. Most of my cameras have higher resolution but they look great at 1920x1080. At home and my phone I always see the house and have not seen a cloud. Is there a way to have Camect set optimal camera setting without starting over? Thanks

[CamectArup]

The "optimization" that Camect does for Hikvision cameras is pretty minimal, so I doubt that it would make anything better in this case. (It does simple things like turning off the on-screen display of the time, which you don't need. In particular, it does not change video encoding parameters from the factory defaults.) 

It's interesting that you have other Hikvision cameras that look fine and the issue only seems to affect this one. Were all the cameras added the same way, or did you add any by hand? It would be interesting to see if the stream URL has the same format for all of them. (e.g., If you wound up fetching a substream rather than the main stream you'd wind up with lower quality -- but that would not happen if all cameras were detected automatically.) 

To see the stream url, open the camera settings (wrench icon), and then click the "i" icon next to "Camera Name" ... See if the url (in the "Video" row) has the same format for the camera that's bad as one that's good. If they were added automatically, they should all look like: 

              rtsp://USER:PASSWORD@IPADDRESS/Streaming/Channels/1

Lastly, could you share some screenshots or a screen capture video to show the bad-looking video? You're describing it as lower resolution, and that may well be the case, but I'm pretty puzzled as to how that could occur if other cameras look fine. (If you make a video, put it in Google drive, get a shareable url, and send that to sup...@camect.com.) 

[Eric Meister]

I worked with Arup and the issue ended up being the aspect ratio of the video feed. Even though my camera and Camect showed 1080p, Camect was actually getting a 2048 resolution. On my phone the video was stretched causing the resolution to look off. I rebooted my cameras and Camect and all is well. Thanks to Camect support for quick responses.