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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

My experience so far with every wifi ONVIF camera I have purchased (at least half a dozen different brands) has been absolutely terrible. Not sure if it's all related to the hardware or just FOSS software support somehow.

They seem to all use the same generic/white label Chinese firmware with barely anything changed about it. Their advertisements of "up to X viewers" really only ever means max of 1 or maybe 2 if you want a decent/max resolution or framerate.

The devices and their video streams are often quite unstable (needing a daily reboot or restart of the stream), jittery and not smooth.

The cost of the device does not seem to make a difference either, whether it's a $50 device or $300+.

Anyone have recommendations or tips on either better brands or maybe some idea of what I might possibly be doing wrong?

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I can’t comment on max viewers per stream, as I only ever had 1 connection to the device and then used an FFMPEG/nginx-rtmp setup to replicate, but the reliability of Axis cameras was good in my experience. The price tags are a bit steep as they are really marketed at enterprise.

I tried Axis around 10 years ago, and yes it was very expensive, $300 for a tiny 802.11b/g-only device when N had already been around for a while was a hard pill to swallow, but I was assured by gstreamer devs that they do in fact use gstreamer itself, write their own firmware, and that they're supposed to be better than the Chinese stuff... however my own experience with them was just as bad if not worse... with all 3 units I purchased. Needless to say I have no desire to try them again.

> every wifi ONVIF camera

I haven't tried a lot of wifi cameras, but I'm not surprised you're having trouble, particularly with multiple simultaneous streams talking directly to the camera.

* Wired should be much more successful. To be clear, wired cameras still have crap firmware [1] but you should be able to get a stable stream.

* If the camera must be wireless, try using an RTSP proxy server so that there's only one direct client. The proxy server can multiplex so you can have several things connecting to it, and ideally they go over the wired LAN. Even if they don't, the wifi hardware/software on anything that isn't a cheap camera is probably a lot more stable. Also, the RTSP implementation is probably a lot better at handling mixed network conditions. I've noticed several cameras' RTSP/TCP support (aka RTP over RTSP interleaved channels) will truncate RTSP data messages when the TCP send buffer fills, throwing off the framing. Nothing good happens after that. And UDP has its own problems (single lost packet => seconds of video questionable/useless, but still sent, and there's no real congestion handling unless they've done a miracle in application code with infrequent RTCP reports). Edit: also, some cameras have a particular bug [2] in which they will continue sending RTP-over-TCP data to a file descriptor after it's closed. The file descriptor is often reused while this is still happening, which causes all sorts of problems, not the least being sending sensitive data over an unauthenticated channel.

[1] In particular, I have very low expectations for their security. Poor software quality, backdoors. Firewall them so nothing can connect to them other than your proxy server / NVR and so that they can't connect out either.

[2] https://github.com/scottlamb/retina/issues/17

Hanwha makes a ton of different makes and models, I highly recommend them. I tested several cameras to use them in a campus-wide AI project and Hanwha was always rock solid. We originally looked at Chinese cameras, but with security and international trade disruptions we needed better assurances that orders would get filled.

Have you tried Amcrest?

Yes that is what I am currently using. Every couple days the stream stops functioning and I have to reboot it. Stream playback with every conceivable FOSS video player I have tried is never 100% smooth and always has some kind of microstutter, regardless of the codec, resolution, framerate, bitrate, stream protocol etc. or number of viewers (and I have tried every combination of them all).

I've been using an Amcrest AD410 doorbell camera with HomeKit Secure Video via Scrypted for about a month and I haven't had any trouble with it at all.

https://www.scrypted.app/

Wyze cameras are cheap and work pretty reliably for me. They don't support onvif. I'm sure it's because they want you to subscribe to their paid services that analyze the video feed.

I want the quality and cheapness and reliability of wyze with onvif.

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