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Vitamin D Video Reference Guide
Getting Started > Setting up Vitamin D Video with An Installed Network Camera
Setting up Vitamin D Video with An Installed Network Camera
See a short video tutorial of this topic here.
If you have a camera that is set up and running on a network, these steps will tell you how to configure Vitamin D Video to communicate with your cameras.
This section walks you through the following:
- Installing Vitamin D Video software
- Activating your upgrade to the Basic or Pro Editions (optional)
- Finding your camera on the network
- Telling Vitamin D Video the user name and password you use to access your camera
- Testing your camera feed
- Giving your camera location a name
1. Install Vitamin D Video
- Double-click the icon of the installer that you downloaded from the Vitamin D website, and follow the on-screen directions.
2. Open the Vitamin D Video application
- The first time you start the Vitamin D Video application, you begin with the free Starter Edition.
- If you have not purchased the Basic or Pro Edition, click User Starter Edition to continue. You can purchase an upgrade by clicking here.
- If you click to Activate license..., you will see a screen asking you to locate the license file that was sent to you when you purchased the application.
- If you did not receive a license file, check your spam filter for a message from Vitamin D.
- IMPORTANT: If you are using Gmail and Internet Explorer, the file may be downloaded as a compressed .zip file. If so, right-click on the zip file and select the "Extract All" option.
- If you cannot find your license file, check your spam filter or search your computer for a file that ends with the ".lic" file type.
- If you have a problem with your license file or need to have another license file sent to you, please contact support@vitamindinc.com.
3. Prepare your camera
- Make sure your camera is turned on and connected to your network.
- If you have multiple routers on your network, make sure your camera is on the same part of your network as your computer.
- If you aren't sure if your camera is on the same part of the network, try continuing with the setup and return to this step if you are unsuccessful.
4. Tell Vitamin D Video how to access your camera
The first time you open Vitamin D Video, a Camera Setup Assistant opens to step you through installing a camera (it can also be accessed from Tools > Add Camera...).
- Leave the setup option at "Set up Vitamin D Video with a network camera that is already working."
- Select your camera in the list of connected network devices (it may take up to a minute for the camera to appear in the list).
If your camera does not appear in the list, your options are:
- Try the troubleshooting tips below and see if you can fix the problem (some of them are simple so you may want to take a look).
- If your camera still does not appear in the list, you need to manually provide the information for Vitamin D Video to talk to your camera. following a different set of steps that are described here.
- A temporary state of your camera.
- Try unplugging your camera, waiting for five seconds, and plugging it back in again.
- A temporary state of your network. Networks and devices periodically check in with each other, and can sometimes get out of sync. Resetting your computer's network connection may help:
- If your computer is connected to a network wirelessly, turn off your computer's Wi-Fi connection and turn it on again.
- If your computer is plugged into a network, unplug the computer Ethernet cable for 30 seconds and plug it in again.
- The list is looking for a different type of camera.
- The list only displays cameras made by the manufacturer you selected in the first set up screen. For example, if you accidentally selected "Axis" as your manufacturer when you meant AirLink, your camera will not be displayed because the list is only showing Axis cameras. You can go back to the first set up screen and check the manufacturer or choose the option to show "Other" to display all cameras.
- Your camera is on part of your network that your computer cannot see.
- Networks can be divided into sections (called "subnets"), for example in some cases with more than one router. If your camera is on a different subnet than your computer, the software cannot see it. This is explained in more detail here.
- If your computer is connected to a router with an Ethernet cable and your camera is on Wi-Fi, try disconnecting that cable and putting the computer on the same Wi-Fi network as the camera. Or, if your computer is connected with Wi-Fi and your camera is connected with Ethernet, try connecting your computer with Ethernet.
- If you are comfortable with configuring networks (or know someone who is!) then you can try connecting your camera directly to a PC to reconfigure it. This is described here.
- A configuration issue with your computer. If you have another computer available on your network, try using using that computer instead. Sometimes a given computer has a specific configuration problem that is not found in others.
- Your camera does not support the "Universal Plug And Play" standard (UPnP). The setup assistant uses this standard to detect devices attached to your network. If your camera does not support UPnP, it will not appear in the list, and you need to manually provide the information for Vitamin D Video to talk to your camera. following a different set of steps that are described here. Sony and ACTi cameras, for example, do not support UPnP. You can try to Google "UPnP" and your camera model name to find out.
- Your camera does not have UPnP turned on. TrendNet cameras, for example, do not have UPnP turned on out of the box. It is necessary to go to the TrendNet configuration website and find the UPnP setting. (In the current version of the website, this can be found at Network > Network. Find the UPnP setting at the bottom and click Enable.)
- Your firewall security settings do not allow UPnP. If you have a different (i.e. more secure) firewall than the Windows default firewall, such as F-secure Client Security, UPnP may be disabled. One workaround is to manually enter the IP address of your cameras. A second workaround is to enable 'multicasts' in your firewall for Vitamin D Video. Specifically, enable it for "Vitamin D Agent." Vitamin D VIdeo multicasts on the IP address "239.255.255.250". It listens for multicasts on UDP port 1900, but also broadcasts a multicast (and listens for responses) on a UDP port that the system assigns it. The above is needed both to populate the list of connected devices as well as to later find a camera that was selected from the list. None of the above is needed if you manually enter the IP address of the camera.
If your camera does not appear in the list of connected devices, click here for troubleshooting tips
If your camera does not appear in the list, some possible causes are:
- Enter the user name and password that you currently use to access your camera into Vitamin D Video. (This is not for the creation of a new user name and password.)
Click here for advanced setup options
If you select Other IP camera instead of your camera model, you can enter a custom URL to access the video stream of your camera.
- The URL consists of the IP address and a custom string of text. For cameras in the camera type list, this string is appended for you (and therefore not shown). For example, if you select the D-Link 920 and enter the IP address 10.0.1.10, the actual URL used is http://10.0.1.10/video.cgi. In addition, if the device appears in the list on the previous screen, that means the IP address is known, so you don't have to enter it. (It is displayed for your convenience, however.)
- To find this string, you can enter the camera model's name, "url" and "mjpeg" or "mpeg4" in a search engine.
- Advanced tip: Network cameras often have multiple URL strings which allows them to access different types of video streams. For example, a given camera might support streaming video using MJPEG compression and MPEG4 compression. MPEG4 generally takes less bandwidth than MJPEG, but the MPEG4 streams for certain cameras have been found to generate video playback issues. This is because MPEG4 keeps one out of every several frames and programmatically fills in the frames in between. MJPEG, on the other hand, keeps and compresses every frame, which is less efficient but sometimes more reliable than MPEG4.
- If you have changed the port assignment of your camera, enter the new port number in the Port box. This is most likely if you have set up "port forwarding" or advanced network management. If not, leave this box blank (the default value is 80).
- (This feature is only available in the Basic and Pro editions.) On the same screen, select the resolution you will use to save your video. A few important points:
- Make sure that your camera supports the selected resolution (specifically, not all cameras support the higher resolutions such as 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024).
- Note that you can save your video at a different resolution than the camera is streaming. To change the resolution of your camera, go to the camera configuration website described above. For example if you set your video to be saved at VGA (640 x 480), you should check your camera configuration website to make sure your camera is streaming at VGA rather than QVGA (320 x 240) or lower.
- Selecting higher resolution settings can increase processing and disk space requirements considerably. For resolutions higher than VGA, you may find it necessary to increase the amount of disk space allocated to saving video, which is described in the section Managing Your Video.
- The set up assistant now attempts to access your camera on the network using the user name and password you entered. This may take a few seconds, or it may take up to 30 seconds or more. The blue box in the middle of the screen should change from saying "Connecting..." to displaying an image of your camera's view.
If no video image appears in the blue box, click here for troubleshooting tips
If the text "Could not connect" appears instead of a video image, that means Vitamin D Video could not access your camera.
- The camera may be rebooting. In that case, the image may reappear after 30 seconds or so.
- You can click the link in the middle of the screen that says view your camera from your browser. This launches your default browser and attempts to find the configuration website of your camera.
- If you can connect to the website, that means that the settings are correct and your camera is working properly, but Vitamin D Video cannot access it. The most common cause might be that the user name or password entered in the previous screen is incorrect. Otherwise, it might be an intermittent network problem, where clicking Back and Next to retry the connection might work. Or it could be some random state where rebooting the computer and trying again will work.
- If you cannot connect to the website, that suggests the problem is somewhere between the camera and the network, such as:
- The camera is not powered on or is malfunctioning.
- Note that your computer needs to be on the same network as your camera. If you set up your camera on a laptop and took the laptop to a different location outside the range of your Wi-Fi network, you will not be able to see your camera (even if you have Internet access on that computer using a different Wi-Fi network).
- Some cameras use the "RTSP" protocol rather than the "HTTP" protocol. You can verify this by clicking Back to view the Settings screen. If so, check if it has settings for the rtsp authentication method on its configuration page. If so, 'digest' mode is not supported by Vitamin D Video, it must be configured to use either 'basic' or 'none."
5. Create a name for your camera location
- Enter a Camera location name, which is used in various places by Vitamin D Video. For example, when looking for video clips, it might be easier to choose between "Front yard" and "Backyard" than it would to choose between "Camera 1" and "Camera 2."
- To change this camera location name after quitting the setup assistant, select Tools > Edit Camera Location.
6. Choose to finish or add another camera
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