Intermittent Picture

[Jim47]

I have a new DS-2CD2542FWD-1 which has been working for a week mounted on a junction box on the door frame in my porch with the cat cabling running under the upstair floor near mains and telephone cables.
I decided to adjust the camera so that it is in portrait orientation and now the camera wont display a picture when the dome housing is attached.
If I knock the box or poke the cables where it exits the junction box, the image briefly re-appears. It has all the symptoms of a loose connection somewhere so I took the RJ45 plug off of my cat5 cable and replaced it to no effect.
If I log into the camera from my browser I can see all the details of the camera and make changes but the live view is blank. Can I conclude from this that the RJ45 network and power connections are OK and that the loose connection is something to do with the wiring to the camera inside the DS. It is very flimsy and I suppose could have been damaged when I re-orientated the camera.
Finally I tried to locate the loose connection on my desk beside my computer using a different cat5 cable but annoyingly the symptoms cannot be repeated.

 

[Kieran]

Hi Jim,

Just to double check - when you say that the symptoms cannot be repeated when using a different cable on your desk, do you mean that the camera works fine as you'd expect, or that it still displays no image and you can't get the image to briefly appear as you can with the original cable?

 

[Jim47]

Yes, when I attach the camera to a cable on my desk I do not get any faults which kind of suggests a fault in the longer cable but it had been working for a while and I changed the RJ45 plug.
I am at a loss to trace this, that's why I asked about accessing the camera via web browser, does this eliminate a fault in the network connection?
Jim

 

[Kieran]

Unfortunately Jim everything is pointing towards the longer cable being at fault. Perhaps not with the RJ45 connectors, but the cable itself.

It seems odd to me that you're able to get a network connection to the camera via the same cable but not a video stream, yet both work fine when connecting on a different cable though. How is the camera connected to your network at both locations? (Camera > PoE injector > Router for example)

If nothing there seems out of the ordinary, I'd definitely start with replacing the cable if possible.

 

[Jim47]

So if the network connection allows me to make changes to the camera, like changeing the day night light setting, this proves that the network cable is OK or are there other connections in the cable which transmit the video?
My camera is fed from an TP-LINK PoE switch.
Just done a daylight test, changing the Day/Night switch. Interestingly the video image is received in the night mode (B&W) but stops after about a second in the day mode (colour).
Testing again in the dark the video image is received in day (colour) mode as well as night mode.
The fact that it worked in my room must be due to the light level being lower and not a bad cable connection to my porch.
Any suggestions on how to get the camera to work in colour?

 

[Jim47]

For information:
Further tests on my desktop PC show that whilst I cannot see the live image in colour on the Hikvision web view Live view, I can view the recorded colour footage in VLC media player but the motion is jittery with remnants and the recorded camera clock stops and starts even though the playback time is incrementing. If I change to B&W I see the live view and the recordings are less jittery.
This is also true of the live view on my Synology.
I have ordered a Western Digital hard drive from USEIP, maybe that will help with the jitters but not sure why live view does not now work.
I have checked Hikvision live view on my laptop and that works OK in colour so must be something to do with my desktop.