It arrived yesterday by
surface turtle.
It looks
just as described. The pictures are deceiving. This is a somewhat bulky creature, (bigger than a fizzie-pop can). That said, it also appears to be very well built and skookum enough to handle a bit of jostling.
Immediate issues:
1. Getting the antenna mounted on the rear panel was a little fiddly. It is a small brass coupler requiring a very small wrench. (The shroud slides forward out of the way however getting the coupler to seat still required a tool).
2. The instruction manual is written in micro-print and required a magnifying glass to read. I
downloaded the manual from FOSCAM which contains a quick set-up guide, a detailed manual for both Windows and Mac and, above all, is easy to read.
3. The software CD included in the box was... EMPTY! Luckily, the FOSCAM site in (2) above has all the
IPCam Tools Setup available for download. Unzipped (they're .RAR) and saved, things were pretty straight forward... sort of.
4. READ THE INSTALLATION manual carefully. The grammar can be a bit tough to follow.
5. The Realtime camera control software is OK. It uses a web-browser for access to administrator functions. It uses Internet Explorer as a "preferred" browser but allows a login by "pushing" Firefox or others on a separate login button. I don't use IE normally but discovered that using any other browser didn't produce all the features available through IE. Recommend using IE to manage the camera.
6. When doing initial set up, do it hard-wired into the router with the very short cat 5 cable provided. (or use your own longer one)
7. You can do almost everything from the camera monitoring software provided including streaming, http uploading and ftp. However, I didn't like the FTP service page in the set up. There is no scheduler so it's off to a 3rd party app to get things working.
8. Yawcam was in a struggle finding the video stream. It detected the camera easily enough but could not connect. I tried WebcamXP5 and watched it cycle through endless connection attempts even though it had reported that the camera and connection was OK. Time-saver: The camera is user identified. In the
password option of Yawcam or WebcamXP, (if you haven't modified it in the camera set up) check off the password box and put
admin in the user id. (No password required).
9. The camera software and the manual don't describe the video stream. In Yawcam it is suggested that
http://(camera ip)/video.mjpeg will acquire the stream. Not so. Luckily WebcamXP, (even though it couldn't connect), produced a dialog box with the name and file extension.
http://(webcam IP)/videostream.cgi. Once I had solved the user/password issue in WebcamXP and given Yawcam the correct LAN URL/filename/file extension both worked very well.
10. I have only just started testing so have yet to put the camera outdoors. (I have a small concern given the advertised operating temperature range of the camera (0 c to 55 c) and we're having a bit of a cold snap here where temps drop below 0 c at night.) That said, initial performance is good indoors. Night vision is not bad and motion detection is quick. I
hope to have it mounted and a webcam page inserted into my weather site by the end of the week. The view out the window is reasonably good - not HD - but as others have already pointed out, it's not an HD price. So far, for the cost, this seems like a darned good rig. Once you navigate around the little potholes like software hiccups and fractured English in the instructions, it all appears to be a very simple and worthwhile investment.
Hopefully my schedule (that's my employer's nice name for the chaos they present me) allows some time to get this beastie active and online by the end of the week.
Cheers
Dave
_________________
When the weather is the focus of the topic, it means we have to start conversations with something else.
Saanichton Weather
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- really appreciate you taking the time to review and report on this camera. I've taken a look at the manual and I can see what you mean about the grammer. 
I think I'll have to start convincing the lady of the house that we need security cameras. I'll obviously need one to test and then get a second (for the sky tee hee) once she is happy.
