Home Security: important parts of life

I bought two of these and that clogged up my wireless network, also gave me trouble constantly, had to unplug them so my wireless network would work normally. Spent over 40 hours with linksys support on the phone, and had the worst time trying to understand what they were trying to say, due to them having too mant marbles in their mouth. This will be the last and final time I ever purchase a POS linksys product ever again! Linksys is garbage!

Also wanted to add, if you plan on adding more then pone camera, better have a dual band router handy, i opted to go out and purchase more ethernet cables, but that still didn’t stop the cameras from giving me problems. Maybe Belkin will come out with ip cameras in the near future, I simply do not trust linksys for any of their products they sell. I once had a router by them which gave me problems, winded up stomping a mud hole in it and walking it dry. Went out and got a Belkin router and never had any problems with it.

I guess now I am going to have to look for another type of camera from a different brand to use. I need a camera to use as a baby monitor when my babies are born in 3 months.
Rating: 1 / 5

I bought this camera for the purpose of using it as a home network security camera and I was planning to buy three more. Overall, I find it to be a very bad choice and I am stuck with this under par camera.

The bad:

- It has some weird and loud noise in the recording. It may just be a defect but its bad for a first impression.

- After installing the software on my laptop, it crashes. For some reason it does not work on my old Dell Inspiron 700m laptop.

- The camera in DHCP mode does not work with the software provided. The software tracks the camera base on its IP address and as a result the software does not work when the ip address changes. What’s the purpose of having it support DHCP??

- It wasn’t a simple setup for me to have the camera only record when there is motion detection. Maybe I am just stupid.

- The camera periodically crashes!

- There were some bugs with setting multiple users in the web interface.

The good:

- I like how they have the ‘mobile’ version of the web interface.

- Very good picture in a dim room

- I like its ability to save directly to a file server but I haven’t tried it yet.

I had high hopes for this camera. Hopefully the next firmware release will make this camera great.
Rating: 1 / 5

The reviews of this camera are lacking the very glaring omission that full features of remote viewing will not be available to the Mac community.

The software interface for running this camera with full control is Active-X dependent (IE), basic viewing is there for any browser, Safari, Firefox, iPhone.

So, once it is set up, and the ports are forwarded and the correct IP address is entered, you can view your camera on your Mac or iPhone but it will be without sound.

I hope someone has a workaround for this, as there are many iPhone users out there, which I’m sure would like to see and hear what their IP cameras are broadcasting.

The install was not seamless, and I am a fairly competent Mac user. The install disc did not want to work on OS 10.4.x, it did work just fine with OS 10.5.x and the install proceeded until it asked for the WiFi network password, which for security purposes is >10 digits and a mixture of alpha-numeric. The camera setup software would not allow the entry of a password greater then 9 digits.

So it was now time to contact Linksys, which was very responsive and worked to sort things out. The first phone call only confirmed that there was a problem in the setup program.

Fortunately I have a Linksys router so they were able to show me where to create the port forwarding info and that accomplished getting the camera on the network.

Remote viewing on iPhone Safari, works well, but there was no sound.

Even though I had enabled the microphone in the camera, there was no sound.

So another couple phone calls to Linksys and another hour, to determine that only Active-X capable browsers (Internet Explorer) are able to control ALL the features of the camera, and that Mac browsers like Safari or Firefox will not.

Now Linksys does say if you can access the camera using a RTSP:// URL

then you should be able to hear sound.

Well, this only seems to launch Realplayer or Quicktime on my Macbook and there is still no sound.

So, high marks on the Video portion of the C80, albeit set up could use some Mac specific notes and support.

Also a little more description about setting up the port forwarding info, which would work with any router.

I have yet to undertake the email portion of the setup, as I have spent enough time on the phone with Linksys – who are generally helpful.

But I had one incredible Tech – Andrew who was spot on!!!!

Rating: 4 / 5