Why is the image blurry on my tablet or phone?
You might be able to improve the picture quality on your iPhone and your iPad by customizing the Sub stream Settings of the DVR.
The DVR offers two streams:
There is the Main Stream, which determines the recording quality. It also determines the quality of the picture that you see on your computer should you access it through the Local Area Network (LAN) or the single camera display on the screen attached to the DVR.
There is the Sub Stream, which primarily determines the remote access quality and to limit the upload speed required. A majority of internet connections cannot reliably render even one main stream display, let alone 4, 8 or 16! It also enables older computers to be able to handle converting the encoded stream of the DVR into video without significantly impacting their performance.
Mobile devices can only access the DVR through an app. The app that you should use is Swannview Pro or (for tablets) Swannview Pro HD. As intended in its design, the Swannview app will automatically grab the Sub Stream of the DVR. Most mobile devices would not be able to cope if they tried to handle the Main Stream of the DVR.
Consequently, what you want to do is to increase the picture quality of the Sub Stream. This is a bit tricky though because the Sub Stream is what you use for remote access. You should not set the Sub Stream any higher than what your Internet connection can possibly stream to the Internet. You need to check on what your ISP is giving you.
Use this link to find out:
Please click here, Speed Test, to test your internet speed.
In the above example, we have an upload speed of 15.77 Mbps (1577 kbps)
Go into the menu of your DVR. Recording > Encoding section.
Select Sub Stream settings.
Then increase the bit rate to the highest value allowed by the upload speed of your Internet connection.
If you had 16 channels set to 256 kbps, the requirement for the internet connection would be 4096 kbps i.e. 4.1 Mbps. We couldn't possibly successfully stream all 16 channels in these conditions.
Such an internet connection would however have no problem streaming 8 cameras at 256 kbps though.
The other setting that you can tweak is the frame rate. The fewer frames per second, the higher the quality of each frame. If you display fewer pictures every second, then the DVR can include more data for each frame, improving the quality.