Troubleshooting Buffering and Latency

What to check when you’re dealing with buffering or latency on your cameras

Live-stream delay varies with network conditions, deployment type, and viewing location, but a single-camera setup on a local network should typically have low latency in both SQ and HQ.

Remote or bandwidth-constrained deployments, such as cellular or long-distance connections, may experience higher delay. If live streaming appears unusually delayed. Review Bandwidth Consumption & Uplink Requirements for Video to confirm your network meets the minimum bandwidth requirements.

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Background

When you view footage on your device, your browser needs to download the video files from the cloud. You can see these files being downloaded on the Network tab in your browser’s developer tools when you filter for ".m4s":

Live view

Historical footage

For a smooth stream, each video file needs to be downloaded in under 1 second. Any longer and the video will not stream smoothly.

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Causes of buffering

There are two causes of camera stream buffering. Insufficient upload speed on the camera’s network and insufficient download speed on the viewer’s network. This causes the video files to be downloaded more slowly.

Notice that the browser took longer than a second to download these files.

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Identifying where the problem is

In order to figure out where the problem is, you will need to conduct a speed test on the camera’s LAN and the affected device’s LAN. You can do that by connecting a computer to the same LAN as the camera or the affected device and running a speed test on your preferred internet speed test website.

Fortunately, Google has a built-in speed test through its search engine: