Greetings all,
It seems many would have the need to remotely view their cameras while away from home. I tried, was successful but
very frustrated at the speed. I use Windows Terminal Services (remote desktop) to connect to my PC @ home. Yes, I
poked a hole in the firewall but got creative with ports to thwart would-be's and wanna-be's. I have DSL at 1.5 Mb/s
down and 256Kb/s up. When viewing remotely, I'm constrained by that uplink at 256Kb/s. Watching three X10 cams and
a rigged camcorder is painfully slow during refresh and scanning ops. Here's what I did. 1) ditched X10's video capture
device due to the res and went with the Hauppauge 950Q. 2) Before leaving the house, I 'clean' my windows desktop
of extraneous apps and junk leaving only the Hauppauge WinTV7 app running. 3) I use WinTV's double-click trick to get
the video window frameless (no controls, icons, etc.). You'll need to know the keyboard shortcuts for recording and
more. 4) I down size that video window to a couple inches by a couple inches. Why? Fewer pixels for remote desktop
to have to transfer across the net (that's the key!). 5) Go to work and connect home. 6) Size down the remote desktop
window at work to just about that of the WinTV window (reduces clutter). 7) Launch windows Magnifier on the machine
at work, size it perfectly around the WinTV window, then select the appropriate magnification level.
Now I've got quick refresh rates and I'm able to see what's going on around the ponderosa. AHP emails me MS14 activity
info so I can pay attention (don't wanna tick off the boss watching HomeTV all day
) I've recently learned that it's
much easier and more attractive to the eyes if you use Windows magnifier's "Invert Colors" feature. It makes the blown
up image appear as you might think an Infrared image would look. It's not though. B/W images are reversed and Color
cam's images appear like something out of Alice down the rabbit-hole. But the images are spectacular. So why is all this
better? 1) Fewer pixels means less data transfer over the internet which means you can pump more screen refreshes
your way. 2) It's better to use the horsepower of the machine at work to render and explode the micro-small video
window in remote desktop. It's like the Star Trek transporter. Take something big on one end, make it small to send, then
explode it back up on the destination end.
I hope this goofiness helps some.
mike
Author
Topic: Remote viewing got you down? (Read 5217 times)