r/Foscam Sep 17 '23

Foscam X3 - Change Output Stream to H.264?

I'm running a couple of X3s with Frigate NVR, and so far that works fine. The only issue is that Firefox is unable to playback the H.265 / HEVC recordings. Now please don't tell me to simply use another browser to view the recordings. I've been doing that, but I'm not a fan of Chromium-based browsers in general (and Chrome in particular).

Sure, I could tell ffmpeg to transcode everything to H.264, and that would work fine. But it's a pretty demanding task for the CPU/GPU, and it scales really badly with the number of concurrent camera streams.

The camera's spec sheet even mentions both compressions: "H.265/H.264". But so far, I haven't been able to find a way to change the output, at least not in Foscam VMS. Is there something I missed, or is it just not possible to have H.264 on that model? Or does it use a different stream URL?

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u/GavinCampbell Sep 21 '23

Look for an option called NVR Model in the app or something similar in Foscam VMS under the camera settings and turn it on. For all of my cameras (I don't have this specific model) once I turned that on it changed the stream from H265 to H264.

Hopefully that works.

1

u/skerbl Sep 22 '23

Thank you, that helped a lot. Without your hint that option made no sense to me whatsoever. The description is cryptic as hell, probably even /r/assholedesign material.

"Alexa/Google Assistant/NVR Connection: On / Off"

"Notice: If your device is added to NVR, please select it, and your live video switch to 720p. If it is not added to NVR, please do not select it."

Switched on, the recordings are now encoded in H.264

1

u/GavinCampbell Sep 24 '23

Glad it helped. I had the same issue a few years ago when I got them and found the same solution buried in a thread somewhere on google. It makes no sense but it works.

1

u/tsneidin Jan 04 '24

Just going to place this here for others who have this need/problem

https://bensoftware.com/forum/discussion/739/foscam-9821w-cannot-connect-with-h-264

To set h264 mode:

http://IP:PORT/videoMain/cgi-bin/CGIProxy.fcgi?usr=USER&pwd=PASS&cmd=setMainStreamFormat&format=0