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[belvedere]

I have four DCS-942L cameras and a 2012 model Airport Express router.  I cannot view live video from outside the router  in any fashion other than mydlink.com's poor quality time-limited forwarded video.  Here is what I have done.

• I have manually mapped four TCP ports through the router for accessing the cameras' web servers.  This works--I can access the camera settings that way, albeit with NO SSL support (dammit).  So, fundamentally, port forwarding works on this router.  The "live view" accessed through the camera's web server does not work, though.
• I mapped port 554 on each camera to ports on the WAN side of my router, TCP and UDP.
• I have made sure that the external ports set on the camera under "Enable UPNP port forwarding" are the same as the external ports set on my router.  (Otherwise the web server wouldn't work from outside.)

When I access the mydlink web site from inside the LAN, I can view my video.  When I run netstat -n -p tcp, I can see connections open to the local 192.168.0.* addresses of my cameras, so it is connecting via the LAN.

If I connect to the Internet outside my LAN, and use the mydlink web site, I get the forwarded, mini-sized video with a 60 second limit.  netstat reveals that connections are being attempted to the INTERNAL ip addresses of my cameras, which of course cannot succeed from outside. 

In addition, if I try to stream video using QuickTime Player from outside, using the URL rtsp://my.ip.address/play2.sdp, the player connects, then says "waiting for stream" and then "switching transports."  It gets stuck there and does not proceed.  On the LAN, using the local IP address, I can stream video just fine.

So...

• Any clue why mydlink.com would try to connect to the LOCAL addresses instead of to the router's address?  Any way to change this?
• What other ports do I need to open to make the video stream work?  I tried mapping ports 5556-5559 to one of my cameras, but that did not work.  Also, I have four cameras and need to be able to map to all of them for this to work.
• The AirPort Express supports "NAT Port Mapping Protocol" which, from my limited research, is not the same as UPNP.  Has anyone else successfully viewed video from outside a router without using UPNP?

I have scoured these forums considerably and have read some success stories using UPNP.  From the DCS-942L manual, it seems like I should be able to set up manual port forwarding in some fashion to make the video stream work.  Clearly, though, some auxiliary connection is being attempted and the client cannot get through to the camera.  Is it possible to even pick this statically, or is the port always dynamically chosen by the camera and therefore absolutely must be set up on the router using UPNP?  If I can't make static port forwarding work, then these cameras are headed to camera heaven soon.

Thanks for any help...

[RYAT3]

> I mapped port 554 on each camera to ports on the WAN side of my router, TCP and UDP.

Each camera needs it's own port. 

[belvedere]

To rephrase: I mapped, for each camera, port 554 to a port on the WAN side of my router.

554 on camera 1 ---> 554 on the router
554 on camera 2 ---> 555 on the router

etc.

[RYAT3]

To rephrase: I mapped, for each camera, port 554 to a port on the WAN side of my router.

554 on camera 1 ---> 554 on the router
554 on camera 2 ---> 555 on the router

etc.

Ok, cool.

Does the http:// .jpeg work from outside and motion jpeg?

I have http working, I haven't tried https yet. 

http://ip:port/image/jpeg.cgi
http://ip:port/video/mjpg.cgi?profileid=1

[belvedere]

Ok, cool.

Does the http:// .jpeg work from outside and motion jpeg?

I have http working, I haven't tried https yet. 

http://ip:port/image/jpeg.cgi
http://ip:port/video/mjpg.cgi?profileid=1

Yep, those both work from the outside.  If i set profile 1 to JPEG, I can access it by clicking the "1" button on the camera's Live View web server page.  I can also access Profile 3.  But H.264 and MPEG do not work.

[belvedere]

I have some new information to share that I should have pointed out earlier.  I have two systems, a laptop running Mac OSX  (personal machine) 10.8.3 and the other running Windows 7 (work machine).

I took the Mac to my office today.  I then fired up Safari (Mac) and IE (Windows) and tried the following:

• I accessed mydlink.com using the Windows machine and the Mac.  In both cases, I was limited to a few minutes of playback at 1/4 size.
• I then accessed each camera individually on the built-in web server.  On both Windows and Mac, I was able to access Profile 1, which is set to JPEG.  Audio worked too.
• I then tried accessing Profile 2, which is set to H.264.  The video and audio didn't load on the Mac... it just sat there with the busy-animation.  The Windows machine streamed the video with no problem.

Both systems were on the same network and have no outbound connection firewalls active.

So, at this point I can at least access video using motion JPEG through the Mac and still get the audio, but it seems like this is an issue with QuickTime's transport mechanism on the Mac.  A search online reveals that old versions of QuickTime allowed the transport to be adjusted, while QuickTime X doesn't even have a preferences pane!

There's still also the issue of not having any video on mydlink.com.  I can clearly access video by accessing the camera's Web server individually, but mydlink.com would be more convenient, and it is definitely possible to stream video using my current router settings. 

[cmontyburns]

I have some new information to share that I should have pointed out earlier.  I have two systems, a laptop running Mac OSX  (personal machine) 10.8.3 and the other running Windows 7 (work machine).

I took the Mac to my office today.  I then fired up Safari (Mac) and IE (Windows) and tried the following:

• I accessed mydlink.com using the Windows machine and the Mac.  In both cases, I was limited to a few minutes of playback at 1/4 size.
• I then accessed each camera individually on the built-in web server.  On both Windows and Mac, I was able to access Profile 1, which is set to JPEG.  Audio worked too.
• I then tried accessing Profile 2, which is set to H.264.  The video and audio didn't load on the Mac... it just sat there with the busy-animation.  The Windows machine streamed the video with no problem.

Both systems were on the same network and have no outbound connection firewalls active.

So, at this point I can at least access video using motion JPEG through the Mac and still get the audio, but it seems like this is an issue with QuickTime's transport mechanism on the Mac.  A search online reveals that old versions of QuickTime allowed the transport to be adjusted, while QuickTime X doesn't even have a preferences pane!

There's still also the issue of not having any video on mydlink.com.  I can clearly access video by accessing the camera's Web server individually, but mydlink.com would be more convenient, and it is definitely possible to stream video using my current router settings. 

Bumping this thread to note that I have exactly the same issue with my DCS-5223L as posted by belvedere, although I can't even get the MJPG video to load when off my LAN.  However, I did find this:

Oddly, while QuickTime will not load the stream via Safari, it does work fine in Chrome.

[belvedere]

Monty,

With the DCS-942L, this appears to be rectified to a certain extent with the 1.20 firmware.  I still cannot use Quicktime from outside the LAN, but the on-board web server now streams through a browser plugin, instead of a Java applet.  The browser plugin streams the video over the HTTP port.  Quicktime, on the other hand, seems to want to open the stream on an auxiliary port, and therefore static port maps don't work.  (At least, that's how it appears to me.)

B.

[cmontyburns]

Hi Belvedere,

Thanks for that data.  I also purchased a 5020L camera and as you say, that one includes a browser plugin instead of relying on Quicktime, likely for the same reason.  As long as the 2332L I posted about above is accessible externally via Chrome, I will be OK -- although I note that even applications like Evocam can't fetch the stream via the WAN, so this is still a limited setup. 

As an aside, I wish I could figure out how to fetch the stream directly via URL, e.g. http://myipaddress:port/video/mjpg.cgi.  None of the common D-Link URLs work on the 2332L as far as I can tell, either by HTTP or RTSP. 

Anyway, thanks for your reply.