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Axis Camera Upgrade Bug?

edited May 2020 in SecuritySpy
So this is kind of a weird one. For years now, I've noticed that some of my Axis cameras just didn't look as sharp through SecSpy as they did directly from the camera website. I looked at Zipstream, stream settings, image settings, and nothing obvious ever popped out at me. Today, after doing another upgrade (going from an older Axis dome to a newer bullet) I saw the same issue. This time I got smart and started tracking the incoming data rate on both SecSpy and the camera's website and noticed an extraordinarily large difference. SecSpy had a data rate in the range of 20-90 KB/s, while the internal camera site had many times higher. The only common theme between today and some of the other cameras exhibiting the same issue was that instead of creating a new network camera, I simply used the old "profile" and changed the IP address. This saves time, but for whatever reason, severely limits the incoming data rate. Once I deleted the camera and added it back, the data rate in SecSpy instantly jumped up and the camera quality improved significantly. I don't know why this should be so, but for some reason, SecSpy doesn't like upgrading/swapping Axis cameras like this and seems to limit the data rate. This was true across three different sites, all running the latest version.

The TLDR version - if you're upgrading from an older Axis camera to a newer one, make sure you delete the old profile and start fresh, even if it takes longer to set up. It's worth it in the end!

Comments

  • This is good detective work and I'm glad you were able to resolve the problem.

    I think I know what might have happened here. In older versions of SecuritySpy (before v4 I believe), a compression quality setting was available for the device settings for cameras. Subsequently, we removed this - basically it wasn't very useful because the only major brand of cameras to support it was Axis. So what must have happened is that, at some point in the past, the quality setting in SecuritySpy was set to low, which then carried forward into all subsequent updates you applied, becoming hidden along the way.

    So what we will now do is to completely remove this for the next update, so any old setting here will be ignored, and the quality will be the camera's default quality.
  • @Ben ah yes, that makes perfect sense as an answer! I remember those settings. Thanks for the update and consistently good work!
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