Bugs
Video Sessions Accumulating, not Ending Properly
Because I use Android phones running IP Webcam as security cameras, I can connect to them remotely with TeamViewer to see what's going on with each device.
SmartTiles would show each camera's video feed, and I could see on the phone that IP Webcam's "Video connections" would go from 0 to 1. When I switched SmartTiles dashboards, IP Webcam would reflect that "Video connections" went back to 0. All good.
With ActionTiles, if I open the panel with my video feeds, each IP Webcam (there are 4) will go from 0 to 1. All good.
If I click on one of the video feeds, it opens it up in a larger view. The IP Webcam now says "Video connections" is 2. Not a great use of bandwidth, but I can live with it.
When I close the larger view, IP Webcam does not decrement the video connections back to 1. In fact, each time I open a camera in larger view, it creates a new IP Webcam stream, but the stream never goes away. After a few days I can end up with 5 or 6 streams, multiplied by 4 cameras, and the network gets laggy.
If I close the ActionTiles browser tab, then the "Video connections" finally decrement back to 0, so something in ActionTiles is keeping old video streams alive.
Can you please help?
Answer
I see the same issues. I had to move my cams to a different panel, and only access them when necessary. I then have to close and reopen AT. I was out of town and opened AT in the morning on my phone, checked video and switched back to main panel. Forgot to close out of the AT window. It ran in the background all day until I got an alert that I had used 10GB of cell data. Oops.
W have come up with a patch that should address this. Please let us know if that's not the case.
Sorry, I cannot test, as Chrome no longer allows ActionTiles to have video tiles with URL authentication, and I don't want to open up my cameras to the world, but thank you for patching!
What type of Cameras do you have?
If they are accessible via IP Address, you can just use your internal LAN address and your router will prevent access as long as you don't port forward...
But perhaps you are port forwarding in order to access via some other camera viewing App using a password?
I wonder if Firefox still allows URL Authentication. The only other workaround that is sometimes successful is to Authorize the stream in a separate tab of the same browser before bringing up the Panel.
I still have the cameras mentioned in the original post - IP Webcam app running on Android phones. I set them up as additional media tiles using their local IP addresses (with original URL authentication intact) and tested.
Using the local IP address they work just like "the old days" in that they are initially blank, but if I open them in another tab and log into them then go back to ActionTiles and refresh the browser tab they will show the video.
Regarding the patch for multiple video sessions remaining open, that is still broken. Opening the media tile to "dedicated view" by clicking on it creates another video session to the camera that remains in place until the whole ActionTiles browser window is closed.
Could you please confirm the browser that you use to display ActionTiles?
Yes, I thought so. This Chrome bug has a history of 6 years! They fixed it, broke it, fixed it, broke it, said won't fix, etc.
There's one more thing we can try on our end. We will let you know when that patch is applied.
This is getting harder to test now that Chrome does not allow URL authentication for sub-assets. I tested with a local URL (which still works in Chrome). The behavior was very difficult to explain, but I'll try.
I opened a TeamViewer session to the phone/camera so I could monitor the number of video sessions. With my dashboard open and the URL authenticated, it showed 1 video session. So far so good.
I clicked the video tile to open the "zoomed view". The video sessions incremented to 2. So far so good.
I closed the zoomed view, and the video sessions stayed at two. I zoomed in again, and the video sessions went to 3, but when I closed the zoomed view, the sessions decremented back to 1. Odd.
I then zoomed in and out several times until there were 5 video sessions open. I closed the zoomed view and waited, and after a short while they decremented back to 1.
I confirmed by zooming in again and creating 2 sessions that, after a while, they decremented back to 1.
Is there a "garbage collector" model at play?
Yes, there's a garbage collection.
I'm surprised that you are able to get multiple sessions running, because the garbage collection should kick in immediately to destroy the existing element before Magnified View is open and then once more after it's closed.
How much of a delay are we talking about before sessions decrement to 1? Are you testing on a desktop or mobile Chrome?
Grrr. This is a very tough bug...
P.S. Well, the good news is that the sessions do go down to one, eventually. So, we are about half way there...
There is a delay of up to about a minute. I can set a timer if you wish?
I am testing with desktop Chrome, latest edition 61.0.3163.79 (Official Build) (64-bit).
I cannot speak for everyone, but I can live with the delay, and I appreciate all the work you're doing trying to fix this.
There's another thing I will try. But I'm glad we are getting there.
Hi there,
We release a major update of ActionTiles which also affects the Media Tiles:
We tried to address this issue in particular. Please let us know if the session issue is resolved.
Thanks
Alex
Works great, looks like you nailed it! The garbage collector runs immediately to decrement the video sessions.
This is fantastic news! I'm super happy to know this works. This was surprisingly difficult to figure out and fix. I think the Media Tiles are now more robust than ever. I hope everyone benefits from the latest updates.
Thanks for confirming the fix!
Customer support service by UserEcho
I still have the cameras mentioned in the original post - IP Webcam app running on Android phones. I set them up as additional media tiles using their local IP addresses (with original URL authentication intact) and tested.
Using the local IP address they work just like "the old days" in that they are initially blank, but if I open them in another tab and log into them then go back to ActionTiles and refresh the browser tab they will show the video.
Regarding the patch for multiple video sessions remaining open, that is still broken. Opening the media tile to "dedicated view" by clicking on it creates another video session to the camera that remains in place until the whole ActionTiles browser window is closed.