IP CAMERA LEARNING & RESOURCE CENTER

We get asked a lot what the difference between a Y-cam Black and a Y-cam knight is. In general:

• They are both ideal for home surveillance
• They can both operate wirelessly
• They are both easy to set up
• They both have audio built-in
• They both deliver quality images in zero-light environments
• They can both be used to create video clips
• They both detect motion and send an email with an image attached
• They can both be used outdoors with the Y-cam Shell
• They both have a maximum resolution of 640×480 pixels (VGA)
• They both stream to MJPEG and MPEG4
• They can both be viewed on iPhones and other cellphones
• They both come with free multi-live software
• They are not both the same color

In short, they’re exactly the same as one another apart from the color.

We hope that settles it.

Another method of accessing an IP camera is by way of a guest user account.

This is a function found in almost every IP camera which allows you to login and view the live images from your camera without having to enter a username or password.

The benefit of guest user access is that you can open an IP camera to visitors.  This allows you to embed the live image in a web page so you can use an IP camera as a streaming webcam attraction.

Almost every IP camera we deal with on a day-to-day basis has some form of multi-level user authentication but what do we mean by this?

User Authentication indicates that before the user can access the live images from an IP camera he/she must first input a username and password to authenticate themselves as a valid user.

‘Multi-level’ authentication implies different levels of permissions for different users.  Each camera type handles user levels differently and some models allow for more customisation than others but typically you can set up users as administrators, operators or viewers.

Administrator

An administrator would have full access to the camera in the same way the owner does.  This allows them to view the live images, control the camera and adjust image settings and access the camera’s setup pages where they would have access to the camera’s full configuration including network settings.

Operator

An operator would be able to view and control the camera and adjust image settings etc. but would not have access to any of the camera’s setup pages.  This allows someone to view and control a PTZ camera but keeps all the critical settings of the camera safe such as the network settings.

Viewer

Finally a viewer would be someone whom, after logging in, would have permission to view the image but would not be able to do anything else.

Please consult your camera’s documentation for further instructions.

H.264 (or MPEG-4 part 10) is an emerging standard in IP video and IP CCTV.  It is a method of video compression which can dramatically reduce the bit-rate of live streaming video without any reduction of image quality.

Side-by-side, the size of the data streaming from a camera using H.264 will be up to 80% less than MJPEG and up to 30-50% less than MPEG-4. This means that bandwidth load across the network is significantly reduced when using H.264 compression and storage costs will be lower when recording CCTV footage.

The downside of H.264 compression has been the increased hardware costs due to greater amounts of processing required by the camera. This has made the technology available in only the very high-end network cameras so far, but this is changing.  With the recent launch of the Axis M10 series we are now seeing the introduction of H.264 in entry-level IP cameras and we think that H.264 will fast become the standard video compression format of choice for all network cameras in the years ahead.