Mine has been blurring for about a year now on initial playback. If I run playback a second time, the video appears fine. I got used to it. Live video is normal. I will try hardware encoding to see if that helps.
I’ve found hardware encoding seems to have glitches with a few different phones I’ve tried, either the video won’t play at first or gets blocky etc.
Blurring when playing back is probably the wifi signal. Once you’ve played it back once, the camera’s wifi has come out of power save and/or some video has buffered so it isn’t blurry the second time. I’ve found playing back from SD takes more bandwidth and is more sensitive to wifi signal than live view is.
If you’re talking about playing back events stored in the cloud that’s totally different, I’m just assuming you’re using SD card.
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Thanks @dave27 , Sounds right, but even my nearest cam that is 3 feet from the router has this same issue. I am pulling off of SD. Even with my new and powerful S24, I see this issue occur. Haven’t tried hardware assistance yet, been busy elsewhere.
Are you in a heavily populated area and/or a lot of bluetooth stuff around your house? These cams rely on 2.4ghz and even strong signal strength can often have very little bandwidth available since you’re sharing it with lots of other stuff. You may try changing channels (if your router isn’t set to auto, try and see what channel it picks as often they have a pretty good selection algorithm). Move any RF producing devices, especially bluetooth, away from router and cams.
Believe it or not you can actually be too close to the router too as the antennas are often designed for range, but if you have multiple cams at different distances that probably isn’t it. There are free wifi scanner tools out there that can help you find the least “busy” channel but sometimes it just comes down to trial and error, repositioning router, moving other electronic devices away.
Another thought too, if your router has USB ports and you’re using them for anything, those are notorious for interfering with 2.4Ghz, especially if you have them set to USB3.0, just another thing to check. Setting them to 2.0 if the router allows it, or using the 2.0 port instead of 3.0 one (if the router has both) solves a lot of wifi issues on the 2.4ghz band for people. Even something like setting the router on top of a PC can be detrimental to the signal.
My OGs and Pan V3s never have any blurriness, sometimes a stutter or freeze on the ones that are further away (especially on the OGs after the latest firmware update). I did try a regular V3 camera and just found they were really susceptible to motion blur, but that sounds like different symptoms to what you’re seeing (this was whether viewing live or SD and that’s the fault of compression, not poor signal).
If you do try the hardware acceleration just keep in mind if you see strange glitches like videos not playing the first time you try, or images overlaying on top of each other, that’s probably what it is. But hopefully it will work at least enough to see if it helps with the blur issue.
The fact that you’re seeing it on multiple cams (not sure if they’re all the same model) tells me it is likely related to transfer rate, but if they’re all the same model, maybe a firmware glitch, not upping their connection speed (coming out of power save) quickly enough when you view them at first.
Only other thought, maybe your SD cards just aren’t ramping up quickly enough (especially if they’re trying to read and write at the same time). Are all the SD cards in the problem cameras the same brand/model? In reality, the cameras record only about 150-200kbytes/sec which should be easy for any card to handle, but if they’re continuously recording, reading and writing at the same time can really slow them down.