ANPVIZ camera slow and losing time

[winstontj]

I have a Chinese POE dome camera that is slow and seems to be losing time. It is always on a 30-45-second delay or lag. We bought three or four of these cameras all at once and they were ALL fine... Then this specific camera we purchased a few months later. It is model IPC-D250W-S. Allegedly it should be identical to all of our other cameras. I'm wondering if I should upgrade the firmware or possibly download the firmware to what the other cameras are running??

This is a hard-wired PoE camera and settings are identical to other similar cameras which work fine. All of the cameras are isolated, none of them hit the internet.

When or if I upgrade the firmware, I would want to isolate the camera: I've got an old desktop and router I can use to do the firmware upgrade. Is it straight forward? (web url, browse for firmware file, upgrade, etc.)??? I guess this is a "get what you pay for" example: Cheap Chinese camera, having problems, no tech support, no information online, no clue how to even find the correct firmware to download LOL...

Thanks for any comments on experience with these types of cameras.

[mikb]

Is the 30-45 second lag there if you watch it "independently of Zoneminder" (i.e. its own app, its own web-page, through VLC ...) ?

Or is the lag being caused by Zoneminder settings, e.g. having accidentally set a frame rate in Zoneminder (should be blank!) which is not the same as the camera's frame rate, leading to an ever increasing buffer? (ZM processes 10 fps, camera sends 10.1 fps, the 0.1 difference gets buffered and it grows ...)

[winstontj]

Is the 30-45 second lag there if you watch it "independently of Zoneminder" (i.e. its own app, its own web-page, through VLC ...) ?

Or is the lag being caused by Zoneminder settings, e.g. having accidentally set a frame rate in Zoneminder (should be blank!) which is not the same as the camera's frame rate, leading to an ever increasing buffer? (ZM processes 10 fps, camera sends 10.1 fps, the 0.1 difference gets buffered and it grows ...)

I am lazy. We set up ZM with the cameras we had at the time, realized that we needed an extra camera because we had a blindspot... Bought the extra camera (that was the camera that was the issue)... and then I filled up the HDD we were using to save events. So right now ZM is off (moving over to bare metal machine from virtual). That camera had never been connected to ZM. It was a delay by viewing it directly through it's web GUI. When you would initially log into the camera the time would match and be correct --and then it would slowly lose time and eventually freeze.

The manufacturer wants you to install the desktop app and connect to the Internet to deal with firmware upgrades, etc. I ended up manually flashing an OLDER firmware version to that camera and it's now fine (exactly the same as all of our other similar cameras).

If I had to guess, it probably was a memory leak in the firmware somewhere. It started fine and then progressively got worse, to the point that the camera would freeze and lock up. With the different (older) firmware it's now fine.


If anyone is curious, I can put the original firmware onto the camera and connect it to ZM to see if it was just the camera's GUI that was losing time, or if it would have translated through to the ZM events or dashboard.

[mikb]

It was a delay by viewing it directly through it's web GUI.

If the camera is suffering from its own incompetence, then I'm not sure ZM would improve that

I was hoping you'd say the lag was not there when viewing directly, but laggy in Zoneminder.

Glad you got it sorted by downgrading the firmware to a working version! No doubt it will work better all round now.

[zeevy]

I have the same camera and plan to buy more. They’re $37 on eBay!

What firmware did you install on them so they keep time properly?