Troubleshooting guide

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NOTE: Starting from 2017/3/1, all technical support are conducted through the Discord forum: Read forum rules before joining.

Introduction

Please follow the steps described in this section to troubleshoot your problem. If you try to contact us about troubleshooting without reading this guide thoroughly, your requests will most likely be ignored.

Firstly, read through all troubleshooting topics to see solutions to some common problems.

If the above doesn't solve the problem, you need to identify the type of your problem. There are some types of problem that is beyond our help and in those cases you need to help yourself first.

Here we present a simple flow-chart diagram for this process, and then we will explain the chart in more detail.

Troubleshooting flow-chart diagram

There are mainly two kinds of problem when we talk about scientific approach to solve any problem. The first one is called reproducible problem, and the other one is called non-reproducible problem. Let's explained the two types as follows:

• Reproducible problem: Given a fixed testing environment and a fixed steps of operation, the problem always show, or with a very high probability to show.

• Non-reproducible problem: No identifiable environment or steps that can be used to generate the problem in a stable and repeatable manner. Random problems are of this kind. Note that a problem can be non-reproducible because you haven't identified the cause, not because it's non-reproducible in nature. Sometimes if you put some effort to test various combination of environment and operation steps, you might be able to isolate a fixed environment and steps to recreate the same problem, thus transforming a problem from a non-reproducible to a reproducible one.

It is important to understand that non-reproducible problems are beyond our help. If you contact us with a non-reproducible problem, you will not receive any response from us. We will, however, collect your feedback as a part of the statistics number for improve future product testing plan.

Now, let's talk about reproducible problems. In theory, most reproducible problems can easily be fixed by trial & error in the lab. However, due to the heterogeneous and complex system integration nature of IP video, many reproducible problems aren't reproducible in our lab, because lacking of some specific equipments required to recreate that particular problem.

Use technical support forum

Starting from 2017/3/1, all technical support are conducted through the Discord forum:

• Read forum rules before joining.

For example, if you report "Some IP camera model can't operate PTZ" problem, it can easily be a reproducible problem, but not in our lab (because we don't have that particular camera model, obviously). That's why we created the Example System, in an effort to solve this dilemma with our limited resources.

So the rules now become simple and straightforward: if your problem is reproducible using the equipments available in our Example System, then we are willing to give it a try to see if we can solve it from software side.

If your problem is reproducible in your environment, but not on Example System, then you must either (a) provide actionable information, or (2) participate the development of Example System so that it will include the necessary equipments to recreate your problem in our lab.

Resource prioritization issue

There are, of course, the factors of resource prioritization and judgement calls. Meaning that even if your problem qualifies as "reproducible using Example System", we still have our own judgement call about whether or not we should invest resources to investigate or fix the problem. That being said, I only wish we have unlimited resources to solve every problem in the world, but sadly we don't. So we must choose where we spend our resources very carefully that will increase our product value the most.

Opening a new case

If you understand the above process properly, you can open a new case with our Case Management subsystem, which will assist you to go through the whole process.