How To Check What’s Wrong With Your Network Camera

Getting your IP camera work well isn’t always easy. So today we’ll share with you a small trick we’ve learned. Chances are it’s nothing new to you, but we feel like a lot of our customers might benefits from us sharing it.

When will this trick come in handy:
– when you’re not sure whether your camera is streaming at all
– when you’re having trouble with your firewall

It’s all about the VLC player. Because VLC is not only good for playing movies. It can also show you your camera’s video and audio stream.

Here’s how you do it:

1) Download VLC (if you don’t have it already)

Just click here, download and install it on your computer.

largeVLC

2) VERY IMPORTANT: Connect to a different network than your camera is connected to

Most often the issue with cameras not showing in click2stream is the firewall or internet router that doesn’t allow the stream to go outside of your network. That means you can see the stream as long as your computer is on the same network, but it can’t reach our servers because they are outside of your network.

Here’s what you need to do:
Take your laptop home (if your camera is running on your company’s premises) or to the work (if your camera is at the office). Or just go to your favorite cafe with WiFi. And do the next steps from there.
If you don’t have a laptop computer you can take with you anywhere, ask a friend living in a different building to use their computer. It won’t be more than 5 minutes (so you can grab a beer and watch a game afterwards together).

3) Open VLC

You probably guessed this one already 😀

4) Go to File > Open Network

Or press CTRL-N (or CMD-N if you’re using a Mac)

VLC Open Network

 

5) Enter your camera’s RTSP or HTTP stream address

Put it into the URL text field.

VLC rtsp address

 

6) OPTIONAL: Click on Open RTP/UDP Stream

Here you can setup a few finer points – like if you have a non-standard port in your firewall or router open for the camera. Usually, the port is 554, but as said, you might have a different one open.

VLC port settings

 

7) Click Open

8) Can you see your camera’s video and hear the audio?

If you can, your camera is working: High five someone close to you!

If it isn’t you know the issue is not with click2stream and you can fix the problem in your camera’s setup.

If it works in VLC, but not on click2stream, don’t panic! Our tech support team will surely be able to help you and make it work. So go to the website and contact them (in live chat or if they’re not available, just drop them an offline message and they’ll get back to you ASAP).

Hope this little trick works well for you.
If you have a trick or two of your own and would like to share them with other click2stream customers, please let us know at sales@click2stream.com