Dlink DCS-950G connection question

[wachen]

I am someone new to IP cameras and this great site. Please forgive me if this question has been asked. (if so, please kindly point me toward the thread. But I searched and cannot find an exact answer).

I just bought a DCS-950G. Great picture quality and relatively painless set up. We are using it as a nanny cam to monitor my home from work.

I have two problems:
1) The camera seems to crash/freeze quite often.
2) My wife can connect to the camera from her work without a problem. But once logged on, she cannot see the video stream. Using IE6, she can see the control buttons on the left, but the picture area is completely black.

My questions are:
For problem #1, is it a problem with the camera or my home network (the camera is wirelessly connected to the router). Will upgrading to, say, DCS-2100G solve this problem? Or would using wired connection to the router solve this problem?

For problem #2, I saw some threads that talks about this problem, but there didn't seem to be a solution. Is it possible that her company is blocking the video stream? or the problem with ActiveX? I know this is not caused by the camera set up, because I can see the picture OK from work (when it doesn't freeze on me)

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[johnnywalker]

My suggestion..
1. Upgrade firmware to v1.06
2. If you can have the MIS of your wife company open 5000~5001 port. You wife will be able to see the image.
Regarding to problem #2, I think they should know this issue. I hope they can improve firmware for it.

[wachen]

johnnywalker,

Thanks for the reply. I updated to v1.06. It is now much more stable.

Problem #2 still exist. My wife works for a large, multi-national company. The IT staff will most likely not going to open the ports for her.

Any other way to get around this?

[newfish]

If you cant get those ports open, you can change the ports in the camera setup> Most of the time ports 81, 82, 8080, (sometimes 8090) are not blocked and can be used as a workaround to having them open up ports in the firewall. Otherwise, you may need to find a friendly in the IT dept to get you a list of which ports are not blocked.

[xplorer]

@wachen

My suggestion might solve your problem # 2. Instead of using IE, please try Dlink software namely IP surveillance. It is not in the category of DCS-950, get it from, for instance, DCS-3220. You need to set up the program to find your DCS-950G, then it is done. To use it for real time video streaming is easy and convenient. You ask me why black screen, I would say the firmware does not help nor the port opening in my case. I guess either some kind of conflict inside the windows (activeX) or bug in firmware itself.

[thibault]

I have exactly the same issue execpt it is not at my job but at home to see the camera from my family house.

On my family lan,where the camera is, everything is ok.

at home I got the black screen instead of video, and I control my firewall settings so I do not think it should be that.

may be active X, but I once put the lowest level of safety in IE6 and I got the same result.

[thibault]

I found the solution the camera does bot only use port 80 (normal one for http) by defaut to display video on the web but also 5000 and 5001.

if your camera is behind a router in a typical private lan addressing :
most common : 192.168.1.x, 192.168.30.x (where is changes for each host on your lan) your will have to redirect port 5000 & 5001 of the camera, for example :

your public IP address, assigned by your ISP is 212.220.10.88,
your have a linksys router or D link , you name it, your lan address wil look like :
192.168.1.x, then your web camera is 192.168.1.50 (configure it in your camera outside of DHCP range, and your camera will always have that fixed private address.

on your router configure port redirection for port 5000 & 5001 :

public_ip_address:5000 -> 192.168.1.50:5000
public_ip_address:5001 -> 192.168.1.50:5001

(leave in blank public address in the router for it can varies)

if your public IP address is not fixed (permanent) use a dyndns.org service to get a permanent url like http://mysite.dyndns.org