View or edit camera settings

  1. In the Site Navigation pane, select Devices and then select Cameras.
  2. Select the relevant camera in the Overview pane.
  3. Open the Settings tab.

You can view or edit settings, such as:

  • Default frame rate
  • Resolution
  • Compression
  • The maximum number of frames between keyframes
  • On-screen date/time/text display for a selected camera, or for all cameras within a device group

The drivers for the cameras determine the content of the Settings tab. The drivers vary depending on the type of camera.

For cameras that support more than one type of stream, for example MJPEG and MPEG-4/H.264/H.265, you can use multi-streaming, see Manage multi-streaming.

Preview

When you change a setting, you can quickly verify the effect of your change if you have the Preview pane enabled.

  • To enable Preview, click the View menu and then click Preview Window.

You cannot use the Preview pane to judge the effect of frame rate changes because the Preview pane's thumbnail images use another frame rate defined in the Options dialog box.

Performance

If you change the settings for Max. frames between keyframes and Max. frames between keyframes mode, it may lower the performance of some functionalities in XProtect Smart Client. For example, XProtect Smart Client requires a keyframe to start up showing video, so a longer period between keyframes, prolongs the XProtect Smart Client start up.

Adding hardware

For more information about how to add hardware to your system, see Add hardware.