Support / Video comes and goes, or stalls
The stream starts and keeps dropping
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What the app does by itself
A stream that stops delivering frames for eight seconds is treated as stalled and reopened. Each retry waits a little longer than the last — one, two, four, eight seconds, up to thirty — so a camera that is rebooting is not hammered while it comes back. After five tries the app stops and says why, rather than spinning forever; from then on it knocks once a minute, so a camera that returns is picked up without anyone touching the screen.
When the network changes — Wi-Fi to another Wi-Fi, or back from mobile data — every stream is reopened immediately.
Why it drops to the substream
A full-resolution stream over weak Wi-Fi is the commonest cause of stalling. When the full stream cannot keep up, ViewTile switches to the camera’s substream by itself and says so on the tile. One tap on MAIN puts the full stream back. In grids the substream is used from the start, because four full streams at once is more than most Wi-Fi handles.
The settings that matter
- Video delay — a longer buffer copes with a weaker network at the cost of feeling less live. The default is a quarter of a second.
- Drop to substream automatically — on by default; turn it off if you would rather see the stall than the smaller picture.
- Reconnect policy — described on the settings screen as it is: automatic, widening, five tries, then diagnose.
When it is the camera
A camera that sends a keyframe only every few seconds, or one whose bitrate is set far above what the Wi-Fi carries, stalls for everyone. The camera’s own screen in ViewTile shows and changes its resolution, frame rate and bitrate; lowering the bitrate is usually the fix.