Support / The tile stays black, or spins and gives up
The camera is found, but there is no picture
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What the tile is telling you
A tile that spins is waiting for the first picture; most cameras send one within two seconds. A tile that gives up shows a short reason under the camera’s name — the same reason you find on the camera’s page under Recent events. Read that first: it names the step that failed.
The three usual reasons
The wrong stream is selected. A camera offers more than one stream, and some of them are not video at all — an audio-only profile, a metadata channel, a stream that the camera has switched off. Open the camera’s page, look under Video streams, and pick the one whose resolution and frame rate look like a picture. The wall uses the smaller stream when several cameras share the screen; a camera whose small stream is switched off looks fine full screen and black on the wall.
The stream needs its own password. On a few cameras the video has a separate login from the settings. If the check passes but the picture does not come, try the stream address route described in Adding a camera by its stream address, with the username and password the camera’s manual gives for the stream.
The picture is too big for the connection. A full-resolution stream set to a very high bitrate never gets its first complete frame across a weak Wi-Fi. Lower the bitrate on the camera’s page under Configure › Stream, or let the wall use the small stream — that is the default.
Two rarer ones
A camera that sends a keyframe only every ten seconds shows black for that long after each reconnect; shorten the keyframe interval on the camera if its settings offer it. And a camera that is starting up answers the check before it can send video; wait a minute and tap the tile.