Best way to "smooth out" remote viewing of video?

[McLovin]

I have a security camera setup. I view it remotely on my laptop.

When I view it on site, the video is smooth.

But when viewed remotely, it's very choppy. Like watching a really bad stop motion movie. Some of the pauses will be 5 or 6 seconds, which makes it difficult to view. Someone will be walking, then freeze, then disappear!

Any way to smooth that out?

[id10t]

Transcode the video to a better streaming format, and serve it up off of a streaming server.

I imagine that your remote viewing is over a regular http server, so transcoding the file may be the best option. Could also be your connection speed - are you viewing from a 3g connection or wireless or ????

[McLovin]

I pretty much don't understand a single word of your first sentence!

For your second, yes, I think it's a regular http server. I view it several ways, from an iPhone 4S Verizon, from a laptop at home that runs through a wireless, and from my office at a laptop that is directly connected (not wireless) to high speed Internet.

[mrybczyn]

With networked video, there's a million things that could be wrong.

If you're seeing crappy video remotely from phone, home, and another good network connection, the problem is probably on site.

Check your internet connection on site, it probably has ****ty upload bandwidth. Very common problem, as ISPs focus on download bandwidth. Spend more for better connection.

Check if your camera can encode highly compressed h264 video, the current state of the art. Play with the quality / size settings. If you've got some old camera, you need a new one with h264 (and maybe even h265, which is coming out this year, twice as good compression). This will require much less internet bandwidth for the same quality of video.

Also, it could be the service provider on either end of your connection, de-prioritizing video packets. Not much you can do about that. They all do it to some extent.

If the camera has a wifi link, try changing channels, you might have noise or competition on the channel you picked. Try using a wifi scanner app on your phone to find an empty channel.

[masraum]

Streaming video uses lots of bandwidth

The reason that it's done when you are home is because you have lots of bandwidth on your home network

It sucks when you are remote because you have a bandwidth bottleneck somewhere

If you could make the remote stream a lower quality it would use less bandwidth and would look smoother remotely viewed

Hopefully your system allows for a high quality local stream and a litre quality remote stream possibly via two different url

[stomachmonkey]

Lots of info about your setup missing.

Are the cameras wired or wireless?

Are you viewing the live stream or does it record to disc and then play back?

Do you know or can you find out what format the cameras/DVR are pushing?

Do they send the signal to a DVR that rebroadcasts to your remote devices or are they hooked into a service that you log into to watch?

When you are on site you are (most likely) on the same network as the cameras, reduced latency.

When viewing remotely the signal needs to leave the facility and make its way to you.

As mentioned, if your broadband is not robust enough in one or both of the locations you'll encounter issues.

Again depending on your setup have you checked to see if you can enable buffering?