A129 Duo Playback stream virtually unusable

[baldrick]

Hi, I have just purchased 1 of these cameras this week. Testing is all good with the exception of the app is so slow with playback streaming I would class it as unusable.
I have tried 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz connections on both my phone (2.4 only ) and my tablet which can use both 2.4 and 5 connections. Result is the same with both devices in that connection is good, I can view live view no problems at all, I can do all setup without any issue. But try and playback a video and get tired of waiting.
I have tried lowering the recorded bitrate, dropping from 60fps to 30, all to no avail. (I have not yet tested the rear camera until I am happy the main camera is good)
Phone is Huawei Gr5 running android 7 and tablet is Lenovo 10 inch running android 6 or 7 , not sure which without starting up and checking it.
Anybody have any suggestions I might try?

 

[nav2004]

Same experience here. You have to retry entering the recordings Playlist. Once you enter, I usually download it to phone and then play. I had to switch from 5ghz to 2.4 after first getting this a month back as it would no longer connect on 5Ghz. Last night I was able to use the App to update from 1.5 to 1.8 firmware. Maybe that has made connections from Cam to App better. I briefly used it after upgrade. Did not realize I could use the App to upgrade firmware until someone mentioned here. Usually after you hit connect to cam, you go on the Live view screen, so I never noticed the menu option on the top left. For that you back out of Live View and then you see the 3 horizontal lines menu. Under you, you can use Open VPN to first connect to your Mobile data. Download the firmware, which is only 4-5 Mb and then connect back to Cam, if will immediately ask if you want to update firmware. Say yes, it will then finished updating and reboot. You have to re-choose all your settings, including wifi password which if you changed, which I would recommend, otherwise any other Viofo user walking by your car can try to see if Wifi is ON. Chances are low, but you don't know who does what if they are bored

 

[baldrick]

Have now had a bit of time to have a look to see if I could see what was going on. What I have found so far:
the A129 actually has a very basic little inbuilt webserver which I believe you will find at 192.168.1.254
As a server it is very basic but does give file names as links which on my Linux notebook machine with firefox streams very well.
It does seem to stutter and drop frames a bit when viewing footage taken at 60fps, but I will blame my laptop hardware struggling using the firefox direct stream for that too. This same stutter happens when viewing downloaded footage on Linux VLC, but works flawlessly using Totem video player.

I connected my phone to this same webserver using android firefox and have found I get the same super slow results as the viofo app.
So again, it appears to me to be a phone hardware / codec issue rather than a direct problem with the viofo camera.
Other info found so far:
Open ports on the camera wifi:
port 80 (http:// std web browser port)
port 443 (https:// but camera has no certificate installed, so is useless for now)
port 554 (rtsp:// real time streaming protocol)
port 3333 ( no idea what they are using that for yet)
port 8000 (no idea what they are using that for yet)

 

[nav2004]

I have used that URL from Android phone and could see the file listings very fast, compared to the App, but playing them or downloading them is another story. I did not find out about the open ports and using them in URL, will play around with them.

 

[baldrick]

After Fw1.8 update, I will now call this issue "Fixed"
Now streams as I would have expected through the android app in real time with just the occasional buffer catch up which I also consider normal.