Last December I ordered a new 4k camera with a plan to swap it for the Hikvision camera which has been in place since January 2016. When the Amcrest UltraHD 4K arrived I connected it in my office and ran some tests for streaming, and time-lapse. Satisfied, I still waited until June to mount and connect the new Amcrest camera, swapping out the Hikvision.
Despite lots of tests I was unable to get a consistent time-lapse after the switch. The streaming on YouTube worked fine, but EvoCam just didn’t seem to like the new camera. Time-lapses were choppy at best often displaying the same image for much, if not the entire, video. The timestamp overlay would change, but not the image.
Over the course of about a month I tried changing various settings in the Amcrest configuration. First trying a smaller image size — no way 4k was going to work — and then changing the bit rates. Nothing worked. Then I tried moving OBS software running the live stream from the ancient Mac Mini to my iMac, leaving only EvoCam on the Mini. No change.
I am admitting defeat on this, and have returned to the Hikvision camera. I am glad I heeded the advice of my wife and left the Hikvision in place, so the swap was a simple reconnection of the Ethernet cable and changing a few things on EvoCam and OBS.
The hope is that I can still use the Amcrest camera in a future project (Sheep Barn Cam anyone?), but for now we are back to where we were a few months ago, but at least everything is working. *knock wood*