X10 Community Forum
📸Cameras & Camera Software => AirSight Cameras => Topic started by: dinosinc on July 16, 2013, 05:36:33 PM
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Wondering if anyone has orderd the new HD cam ?
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I got two of them last week, the xx59a, the HD model with SC slot. Having owned and loved several airsight SD's from the day they were released almost, I was very excited to get the HD and the memory card option.
Suffice to say Im EXTREMELY disappointed.
From what I can tell, the night vision is terrible, neigh useless, in stark contrast to the SD model which was amazing.
I say from what I can tell, because its quite the chore to actually get these things working, and seemingly impossible to keep them operational. Wireless is flaky at best, and wont accept PSKs that contain anything except numbers or letters from what I can tell. Once you get them working, wired or wireless, I find they often stroke out, I will get nothing but a small blue box on the video screen, the settings in the video menu are all gone and unchangeable. I havent figure out what combination of rebooting and power cycling actually fixes this yet but I can get them working again if I play with them enough. Also sometimes I just get the display saying "video" and nothing else.
From there the UI is okay but not as nice as the SD unit, and the motion detection is terrible, it goes off constantly (possibly because of the horrible quality of the night vision I dont know yet) and instead of 6 spaced pictures like the SD model, you get only 3, so its hard to catch anything from email.
Im sure some of this will be fixed eventually when they finally release new firmware, but once I can get a comparison of the night vision between two identically placed cameras and confirm my belief of its shortcomings I am going to return the both of these, as that is a necessary part of my use.
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So far what Ive found in daylight use, server push mode gives a pretty terrible picture, VLC mode gives an image comparable to the SD camera but with a wider view
HD - VLC (I had to resize for hosting, its a hair clearer than this in reality but just barely)
http://myfiero.com/uploads/33176_.jpg
SD
http://myfiero.com/uploads/33174_.jpg
And this is what you can typically expect to see from the HD cam... if you're lucky, this is server push, VLC just gives you audio with a black picture, or sometimes its just a small blue box. Both cameras do this randomly.
http://myfiero.com/uploads/33175_.jpg
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Ive been beating on it all day, what it appears to come down to is it will only transmit HD over VLC (maybe quicktime but Im not stupid enough to install that crapware to see).
So MJPEG is only 640*480, which with twice the viewing angle of the SD cam leaves a completely useless image.
This also means you cant get a usable picture on a mobile device either, and for some reason using the VLC with these and my iSpy DVR, it just murders the processor, it cant even handle one camera in VLC, works fine for all of them in MJPEG, but the camera is only sending an SD image there so its useless.
I found some SDKs for the foscam equivalent, but the airsight will not accept the required parameters to modify the resolution of the video stream, up or down, its possible the syntax is different.
I was able to find video_snapshot.gci by poking around the cgi-bin which will give a HD jpg
I also found the camera responds to telnet with "A320D Login: " but I havent stumbled onto the password yet. Im fairly positive there is a configuration parameter in the files somewhere that would fix this.
If you could get HD video out of this HD camera, it would make for a passable product, but the activeX interface for the SD cameras is still massively superior