New RLC-423 owner - observations and suggestions

vgreen20

Reolink Staff:

Have had my new RLC-423 for a few days now. Running under Lubuntu 16.04 and the Android app.

I am very impressed with the hardware. Build quality is excellent given the value price of the unit.

Software and firmware could use some work. Some observations and thoughts on that follow.

Some suggestions for the UI of the Web Client:

If you mistakenly click "Set" instead of "Call" when an already established preset has been selected, the preset will be overwritten with the PTZ parameters of whatever the camera is displaying. You should display a confirmation dialog: "Preset already exists. Overwrite? (yes/no)". Otherwise it just happens and you'll need to re-create the preset if the camera was aimed somewhere else.

Remember whatever P/T Speed setting was last used. The default of 32 is way too fast for manual panning. Would be nice to not have to drag the slider every time.

Other things that need to be addressed:

"Balanced" stream needs to be available as RTSP. Many other owners have commented on this. Is this a chipset limitation? I can't figure out why you haven't done this.

Snapshot resolution needs to be specifiable. I come from a Vivotek camera background where this is possible. Even having the three choices (Fluent, Balanced, Clear) would be OK with me.

Those of us who have kicked Windows to the curb and run Linux have no choice but to use the Web client. The Windows client when run under WINE 3.0.1 starts and allows you to log in and change settings, but crashes when a stream is started. Still looking into this. Will let everyone know if I get it to work.

The Web client when run under Firefox uses Flash which is a horrible thing. I realize that Firefox blocked the VLC NPAPI plugin a few years back which limits your choices as far as displaying H264 on a Web page, but there's got to be something better. I have found that you need to refresh the page often to get the Flash plugin to start up, and it quits for no reason.

Using Chrome works better, but still requires occasional page refreshes to keep the live display.

Running the Web client under Firefox with a Balanced stream uses about 27 - 30% CPU on an Intel i5-6260 and 40-47% using a Clear stream. Chrome is about the same, but overall seems to display better.

This amount of CPU seems excessive when compared with playing the Clear stream with ffplay (about as lightweight a player as you can have under Linux) which consumes a constant 12% and plays much more smoothly than the Web client. I would have liked to play the Balanced stream with ffplay so I could make a one for one comparison, but as discussed above, the Balanced stream is not available as RTSP.

See attached screenshots for more info.

What I would prefer to do is use ffplay to display the stream, and have a separate Web app to operate the PTZ functions. The PTZ drop-down in the Web Client has all those controls. If you could release just that code (and the login code) as a stand-alone Web page, that would be wonderful.

Anyway, you guys have a great product as far as the hardware goes. The deficiencies are mostly firmware and software related, which should mean something can be done about them.

Let me know if I can provide any other information or otherwise be of help.

Vance
chrome_balanced.jpg
chrome_clear.jpg
ffplay_clear.jpg
firefox_balanced.jpg
firefox_clear.jpg

Lisa

Dear Vance,
Thank you very much for you valuable and specific suggestions. I have feedback all of your advice to our senior engineers and we'll evaluate them to see whether we can make improvements in the future. We really appreciate your sincere suggestion again!

vgreen20

More observations,thoughts and suggestions:

Observation:

on re-reading this doc:

https://reolink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Reolink-CGI-command-v1.61.pdf

I find that the Balanced stream is available as RTMP:

rtmp://192.168.2.119/bcs/channel0_ext.bcs?channel=0&stream=2&user=admin&password=123456

This plays with ffplay using only 5% CPU on the i5 machine. Nice.

Did a little looking around and discovered that RTMP is a semi-proprietary Adobe format and that the only way (that I have discovered so far) to embed it in a Web page is to use Flash to play it.

Not nice at all. Right back to where we started. Flash is awful. Will keep looking.

How are you displaying the video in the Android app? Can't be Flash as support for the Flash plugin for Android was dropped years ago.

Suggestion:

In the client software docs, you say this:

"For this reason, don’t use PTZ systems and motion detection simultaneously. The Camera will interpret the camera
moving as ‘motion’ and record. This is particularly true when using Cruise Mode - as the camera is moving almost
continuously, so too is the Camera recording almost continuously!"

Quite true. Why not have the camera automatically disable motion detect (if it is enabled) when it receives a PTZ command and re-enable it when the command completes?

vgreen20

audrdem -

Thanks for that.

I simply can't understand why this hasn't been done. Any PTZ command has to return a result code when the operation completes, else the controlling app will not know to wait before sending another. Should be a simple thing to programatically "untick" the Device Settings>>Network>>Advanced>>Email>>Schedule setting (which is apparently, unless I have missed something, the only way to get Motion Detect to stop sending alerts - kinda lame. An "Enable Motion Detect" on the Alarm>>Motion>>Sensitivity page would make more sense.) and then enable it again.

Perhaps they will re-visit this.

audrdem

Since they not able implement in Android app on/off for alarm and cruise, I don't believe that they be able to program firmware.