Ames100's Full Review: Trendware TV-IP400W Network Camera
This TV-IP400W is a wireless internet webcam with remote-control motorized pan and tilt capability. Great for monitoring your home while you are away at the office or on vacation, or for monitoring a remote property.
Features: - CMOS image sensor with VGA resolution (640 x 480) - Wide range of pan and tilt movement allows wide field of view - Wired ethernet or wireless 802.11 b/g WiFi interface to computer or internet router; supports WEP and WPA/PSK encryption on wireless - Operates as an independent internet appliance without needing a computer - Simple HTML browser interface with menus and tabs, much like a wireless router - Video streaming capability with choice of resolution/compression - Secure access by username/password, with optional restricted control - Automated scheduled image upload by email or ftp to your own account/server - Can save up to 24 preset positions for quick access - Supplied IPView Pro software allows motion detection and multiple-camera operation from a Windows PC - Supports Dynamic DNS updating and NTP Time Server synchronization
It works pretty much as advertised, but there are some drawbacks and problems to be aware of:
Drawbacks: - Configuration can be difficult due to the complexity, the sketchy instructions and a few bugs – be prepared to spend some time and/or seek help from a networking expert - Image quality is at best average for an inexpensive webcam with CMOS sensor – a bit fuzzy, washed-out color, noisy in low light - Manual focus, digital zoom only (and the digital zoom is pretty much useless due to the fuzzy low-resolution image) - The web browser you use for viewing the camera picture must be able to run a Java or ActiveX applet for video streaming and control functions (but there is a workaround for control functions) - Email server configuration options are not extensive, does not support SSL (e.g. Gmail) or IMAP - Motion detection is not built into this model; it requires a separate PC running the IPView software - Wireless video streaming performance is not very good, decent frame rate barely possible with the smallest image size/max compression - No microphone, so you won’t receive any sound. - No Windows camera driver available to use it as a local webcam.
Bugs: - Firefox browser with Java applet works only after a firmware update from the Trendnet web site - Frustratingly difficult to get wireless network, email and FTP connections working. I found the same problem as other users have reported, i.e., that it will refuse to work the first dozen tries and then just starts working seemingly at random for no apparent reason. - Timeouts on contacting SMTP and FTP servers are too short.
The webcam is meant to rest on a flat surface, and you will probably want to position it where it can see all the areas you want. The only place it can’t look is directly behind, where the WiFi antenna sits. It comes with a wall mounting plate if you feel like screwing it to a vertical wall instead of sitting it on a horizontal surface. Otherwise the only assembly required is to attach the WiFi antenna. The single-voltage power supply is reasonably compact. It puts out a hefty 2.5 amps at 5 volts, but my power meter says it draws 8 watts peak while camera is moving, less than 4 normally, so it's actually no more than a small night-light. It’s not weatherproof, so it's not meant to be used outdoors without some kind of shelter to protect it from rain and blowing dust.
The web browser interface to the camera works fine for PCs with common browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox that can run ActiveX or Java applications. Response can be slow sometimes, but normally it’s fine with a high-speed internet connection that’s working properly. Video streaming lags when using a wireless connection over the internet, but it’s not a big issue if you don’t need real-time performance. Unfortunately you may have more trouble monitoring the camera from portable internet devices like cell phones. Most of those portable devices can’t run ActiveX or Java, precluding them from accessing the camera controls. Some of them can display the webcam home page, which contains an up-to-date static snapshot from the camera. For those that can’t, the following url format can be used to download a single image: http://yourcam.dyndns.org:81/IMAGE.JPG (an example, where "yourcam.dyndns.org" is the url of your camera and "81" is the port number you are using). I was able to display an image in IE on my WM6 smartphone by entering this form of url directly. There is also a way to control the camera even if you can't run ActiveX or Java apps (see the end of this review). Note that you will have to specify username and password to gain access the first time if you have turned on user security on the webcam.
The camera swivels fairly quickly when commanded to move – usually too fast for the video to show more than a blur. The stepper motor is quite noisy as it moves, so it would certainly alert anyone in the room (no stealth surveillance possible!). You can set the amount of movement commanded by each click of the Up/Down/Left/Right buttons in degrees in the browser control interface. But it’s easier to Save a few preset positions in the drop-down list, allowing you to select a position and go to it quickly in one movement using the GoTo button. The webcam does have a memory that preserves the preset positions while it is unplugged. Some people have said that the preset positions tend to drift from the original settings, but I think that’s caused by accidentally moving the camera position manually while adjusting the location or focus – it’s quite easy to do accidentally. The home position should be reset correctly when the camera is turned off and on (by unplugging and re-plugging; there's no on/off switch), as it does the startup calibration swivel check.
There’s a Swing button in the browser interface that swivels the camera once through all the preset positions automatically, pausing on each for a few seconds, but it doesn’t continue to cycle. It would probably cause too much wear on the motor to have it swivel continuously.
The camera adjusts exposure automatically as the light level changes, taking a few seconds if you swivel quickly to an area with a big difference in light level. The picture gets noisy in dim light, but it seems adequate in any light that suits the human eye (no night vision capability though). It can’t adjust focus, as the only focus adjustment is a manual focus ring on the front of the camera.
The wireless range and performance are adequate in my home with my existing wireless G router. Video update gets slower at longer ranges, but I haven’t done detailed tests. There is occasional interference in the video stream, but not enough to be a problem. It normally operates reliably when left on for days at a time, re-connecting smoothly when the wireless network is turned on again after being shut down. Email and FTP image uploads may not work on any given day if the respective servers are too slow responding (see setup details below). On some occasions the webcam doesn't connect successfully to the WiFi router on startup, and needs a restart. On other occasions it can be difficult to contact and slow to respond for several hours, but it normally recovers on its own. I have no easy way to tell what the cause of the temporary problem is on these occasions – could be the camera, wireless interference, the router, or my internet link. I have left it on and unattended for several weeks at a time while I was traveling, and it continued to operate reliably with only a few temporary service interruptions.
Correct time-keeping is important if you are using the scheduled email/FTP image upload functions. The webcam seems to keep track of the current date and time when it is unplugged for a while, so it must have some sort of built-in battery-powered clock. It can also be set to synch with computer time when you access it with the browser applet, or sync automatically with an NTP Time Server on the internet. However I've seen the date time reset to default values when the camera was powered on a couple of times, both when set to use the internal clock and when set to use an NTP Time Server - cause unknown. Also the clock has no DST option, so you'll have to spring forward/fall back manually.
Some wireless webcams of this type have a built-in motion detection function, emailing an alert with a photo if a significant change is detected in the camera image. However, Trendnet did not include that function with this camera model, although you might expect it since it is advertised prominently as a feature. What they mean is that motion detection is supported by the supplied IPView Pro software for Windows PCs. You can set up IPView Pro to received the video stream from your webcam and do motion detection, but of course it only works if you leave your PC running IPView Pro all the time.
Trendnet does have a tech support page for this webcam, and I was able to download a firmware update that fixed the Firefox compatibility issue (although that wasn’t mentioned as one of the issues addressed in the update). I also emailed Trendnet tech support about a couple of my issues, and I did receive a response within a few days. Not an extremely helpful response, but at least I got one.
CAUTION, TECHNICAL DETAIL AHEAD
I’m going to describe some details of configuring the camera and connecting to your wireless network here to give a sense of the complexity. Feel free to skip this section and go to the conclusion if you’re just interested in the review.
Step 1. Initial configuration
This must be done with a hardwired Ethernet interface. An Ethernet cable is provided.
The default webcam IP address is 192.168.0.20. In order to access the webcam for initial configuration, it must be in the same subdomain as your computer, as specified by the computer or router’s subdomain mask value (usually 255.255.255.0, meaning that the first 3 fields of your local IP address must be the same). This works fine if you have a common router model from vendors like Trendnet or Netgear, but requires some network reconfiguration if your computer or router happens to be using a different subdomain. This is not well explained.
When you enter the router’s IP address in your browser, you should immediately be able to see the camera picture on the router home page. You can test the video streaming and position controls using the ActiveX or Java tabs in the browser interface. Note that the ActiveX interface works only with Microsoft Internet Explorer – all other browsers must use Java. An update to the webcam firmware is required to support the Java interface in Firefox.
Next go to the Configuration – Wireless menu and set up your wireless networking parameters (i.e., encryption type and key). If your wireless router broadcasts SSID (which it should), you can see it in the dropdown list and select it as the network you want to use. Save this configuration. Then you can unplug from hardwired Ethernet and you should be able to access the webcam wirelessly at the same IP address. The orange Link light on the webcam should blink a few times as it connects, and then stay on steadily. If it blinks on and off slowly every few seconds, it’s trying to connect unsuccessfully.
This is where I had my first major problem. The webcam would not connect to my WPA/PSK encrypted wireless network. This is important, because anything less is too insecure to leave the router on and connected to the internet unattended. A quick test confirmed that it would connect if I turned off encryption on my router, so the problem was obviously with the encryption. Eventually after an hour of trial and error experimentation I discovered that it would connect if I switched to an all-uppercase password. But a few days later I tested it again with the original lowercase password, and it worked fine! Explanation unknown…
Step 2: Internet Access
Next you need to set up external internet access to your webcam. This may be difficult to test properly from within your own home network, but you can configure it for later testing from another location. However, the instructions provided are very sketchy.
The webcam is an HTML server, using TCP/IP port 80 by default. Unfortunately many ISPs block HTML servers on port 80, they say because it is frequently exploited by viruses to communicate from infected PCs. This ISP port blocking will prevent any attempt to communicate with your webcam over the internet, and it is outside your control. Fortunately the webcam allows you to specify an alternative port number such as 81 (or any other unused value you prefer, such as 10000). Most ISPs don’t block HTML on these alternative ports; i.e., they block the default port number 80, not the HTML server protocol as long as it’s on a different port number.
Incoming requests from the internet to access the webcam don’t automatically know where to go when they hit your router. You have to tell them where to go by setting up port forwarding in your router. Whatever HTML port number you selected above (e.g., 81), you have to configure your router to forward that port number to the local webcam IP address 192.168.0.20 (although you can also change that).
Additionally, you must tell the webcam that your router is the internet gateway it should use to access the internet. Enter the router’s local IP address (e.g., 192.168.0.1) in the Gateway field of the webcam’s Network configuration.
Now you should be able to access your webcam over the internet from outside your local network, but only by knowing your own external IP address. You would probably have to get that from your router status page if you are using a dynamic IP address (as most people are), and it would change from time to time.
Fortunately there’s a better way than using your dynamic IP address: set up a Dynamic DNS Service, such as the one provided by dyndns.org. That will let you specify your webcam address as something like http://myhouse.dyndns.org:81 rather than having to use a variable IP number. I won’t explain how to set up dynamic DNS here; you can find it online at places like dyndns.org. The webcam supports a Dynamic DNS Update function which you use if the webcam is getting its own dynamic IP address directly from your ISP’s DHCP server, but most people will be using a wireless router which has a Dynamic DNS Update function set up already. In that case you can ignore the equivalent function in the webcam.
Step 3: Email and FTP uploading
This webcam can be set to upload images automatically on a schedule via SMTP email or via FTP to a remote host. You can set up the SMTP email parameters, the FTP host logon parameters, and the upload time schedule in the Configuration options. Under Tools you will find functions to test the email upload and the FTP upload. The final results of each test are reported a minute later under Status, requiring you to switch screens.
The SMTP email setup doesn’t support all the parameters you would find in most email programs. You can change the SMTP port number, but it doesn't support any mail protocols other than basic unencrypted SMTP. In particular, it doesn’t support SSL, so you wouldn’t be able to send messages via Gmail’s SMTP server. Nevertheless it should work with most ISP email servers on port 25.
I had some difficulty getting the FTP upload and the email to contact the respective servers initially, but eventually it started working, for no apparent reason. Unfortunately it also stops working again on occasion for no apparent reason. [Update: I've discovered that one of the reasons for this apparently random failure is the short server response timeout in the Trendnet firmware. For example my ISP's slow SMTP server takes more than 30 seconds respond on some days, and on those days the Trendnet camera cannot send email. Unfortunately there's no way to change this. Trendnet should really update their firmware to allow longer timeouts.]
You do need to specify your DNS before the webcam can translate SMTP or FTP server urls to IP addresses. You would either specify your router, or the DNS addresses provided by your ISP in the Network - DNS configuration of the webcam.
Step 4: IPView Pro Software
You can install the IPView Pro software on your Windows PC to monitor the camera, although you should probably download the updated version from Trendnet's web site rather than installing from the supplied CDROM since the update corrects a number of bugs such as memory leaks. The reasons why you would want to use this software as opposed to the browser interface are: 1. You have multiple cameras and you want to monitor them all at once. 2. You want to record from the camera on a schedule. 3. You want motion detection alerting (email alert message with snapshot and play a sound file on the PC when motion is detected)
The IPView Pro software works, but frankly it's not very good. There's no manual and only a superficial help file. The user interface is clumsy and non-standard - it seems to be intended to emulate an old-style analog security camera monitoring station. It has a fixed 1024 x 768 window size which cannot be moved from the middle of your desktop. It's not designed specifically for this Trendnet camera, so some key features are lacking - for example, it is unable to select preset positions. You might expect to be able to do more advanced things like swing the camera through the preset positions and capture a multi-image mosaic of the different views, or automatically record a short video segment on motion detection, but it can't do any of those things. The email configuration for motion detection alerting lacks a Test function, and it has no feedback on problems other than the log message "It's unable to send mails" (I had to use Ethereal to capture the SMTP traffic to discover that my SMTP server didn't like the sender address that IPView was using). After a while it stops displaying images entirely and needs to be shut down and restarted to recover (probably due to more memory leaks).
Custom Programming:
Trendnet also supplies the unexplained applet Xplug.ocx on the installation CD, which is intended for programmers. For those interested in the technical details of the camera's CGI web control interface, see http://www.mijico.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=39 and http://www.sfpeter.com/2007/08/20/19/. It should be possible to implement remote camera control from your own program using this information. It would't be hard to do better than IPView Pro!
I couldn't find any way to enter a simple url in my cell phone's browser address line to move the camera to a preset position since it doesn't support ActiveX or Java, but here's the HTML web page code which will do the trick if you save it as a local HTML file on the phone or put it on your own server and load it into to your mobile browser:
Change the [ ] square brackets to < > angle brackets (character substitution required to pass the epinions HTML filter) and change "myhouse.dyndns.org:81" to your camera address and port number of course. Loading this page in your phone browser will display a current image and a Position field with a GoTo button. Refresh/Reload the page to see the image from the new position after using GoTo to set the position.
While the IPView software provides no built-in way to look at the different preset positions, you could use the above web page code along with a simple Windows scripting tool such as AutoIt to automatically swivel the camera to the different preset positions on a repeating schedule.
Conclusion:
I give it a qualified “thumbs up”, at least at the price I paid for it. It performs its basic function well enough, and it has a range of interesting and useful capabilities. But if I had paid anything like full list price for it, I might be a bit less forgiving of the fuzzy image in low light, the lack of zoom capability, no microphone, and lack of a built-in motion detection function. I also have to caution networking novices about the potential difficulty of configuring the unit, but it's no worse than other internet webcams.
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