3 Tips for Foscam Wireless Cameras

Foscam wireless cameras are extremely popular, and for good reason — they have a solid feature set and great price points compared to many other IP cameras out there. Along with Axis cameras they are the top wireless IP cameras used with our cloud video monitoring service.

Still, they aren’t without their quirks. Here are 3 things every owner should know about their Foscam wireless camera.

1. Image Support Only. If you want your camera to store any recordings in the cloud (e.g. via FTP), you need to keep in mind the following: Foscam doesn’t transfer video. A bit counter-intuitive given that it’s a video camera, but like many consumer-grade cameras, they only FTP JPEG images, not video. So if you want to configure your Foscam to capture motion events, you need to keep this in mind. For example, the Camcloud IP camera cloud storage feature can handle uploaded images, but not every service can and we’ve had many users ask us where they can find their saved videos!

2. Stay on Top of Firmware Updates. This is really important, in particular for security concerns. There have been more than a few examples of IP cameras that have been hacked. The common denominators across most of these situations are: users did not update their firmware and/or they left the default manufacturers admin password. Both bad ideas.

3. Live Streaming Setup. If you want to fetch live video from your camera, you need to access the camera using a streaming URL. Some of their newer models such as the Foscam FI9821W/02W don’t support MJPEG streams at all and you need to update to the latest firmware — here are some details from Foscam. Be sure to follow the instructions as it requires a two step process. First to assign a MJPEG stream and then a URL to fetch that stream.

Just keep these gotchas in-mind and you should have no problem enjoying your Foscam wireless camera. If you want to add cloud storage, mobile apps and other features to your Foscam give Camcloud a try. We have free and paid plans available.