Compatibility With Panasonic AW-HE40HPK IP camera

Hello,

I am currently working for an organization to help them with streaming—I started after an AV company helped install a setup for my organization. Unfortunately the setup uses the Panasonic AW-HE40HPK IP camera, which, as the “Tested IP Cameras” section in the Pearl 2 manual says, “the Panasonic AW-HE40 did not consistently synchronize its time with Pearl-2”.

Which is exactly the problem I am having: “source time and system time not synchronized”, which manifests as major (500ms+) desyncs between audio and video. It sometimes becomes out of sync during a stream, but usually we apply a fix everytime before stream and it lasts for the 1-2hour stream.

My organization ‘fixes’ the issue by adjusting the “audio delay” in the Pearl 2 RTSP input page for the camera. By increasing (and decreasing, alternating) the audio delay by 1ms before every stream. This causes the audio and video to come back into sync.

From my understanding, the “fix” just forces the camera (or feed) to restart.

My questions are: is there a permanent fix for this? Is this a problem that can be solved by firmware updates on Epiphan’s side? Is there a fix or different feature that might not be focused on fixing this camera situation, but fixes or better monitors audio delay?

I was thinking a last ditch effort I could look into is a script or program that restarts the feed/camera automatically before stream/recording to fix the audio delay.

I’ve been intermittently attempting to fix this problem the last few months; looking on this forum, the manual for the Pearl 2, the manual for the Panasonic camera, etc.

I’m very stumped and the only attempt in fixing this that I have tried so far was verifying the cameras are connecting to the Pearl 2’s local time server (it is).

I see this problem is multiple years old and there is no solution for it yet, so I hope this brings attention to the problem if Epiphan could fix it in a future firmware update, or if someone comes up with a solution they could post it here for future users.

Hello Michael,

Thank you for reaching out and describing what you have being doing to work around the issue. Looking back on the testing notes, noting these are from some years ago, the issue appears to be caused by how the camera stamps its packets. We’ve done tests with other cameras and directly with different OSes, syncing Pearl to those or vise-versa and it worked fine.

Curious, we did change our timestamp implementation not long ago, so I would be curious if updating the Pearl-2 firmware might help?

You can do this from the firmware upgrade page, or let me know and I will share the latest firmware with you (version 4.23.1)

After updating the firmware, enable the time server option in the Pearl-2 date and time settings, and enter the Pearl-2 IP in the camera’s NTP settings, if possible.

Does this help?

Hi, sorry for not replying for a while, but I did the firmware update (we were on 4.20.0, updated to 4.23.1) and unfortunately it did not fix the issue. I also made sure the timeservers of the cameras were using the ip address of the pearl-2.

Thank you for trying that - as in our testing notes the issues seems to be with this particular camera’s timesync implementation which doesn’t appear compatible with Pearl. Unfortunately, as the camera is quite old I do not believe a fix will be implemented in this case. I am sorry for any inconvenience that may cause.

The last thing I would try is to tell the Pearl to ignore timecode from the camera but this may result in the same drifting issue you are seeing overtime.

Otherwise, your script idea is likely the best way to automate this. Noting, currently there is no REST API for RTSP inputs; clicking the apply button the webUI is a type of form submission. You can still send this in an API if structured correctly, as applications like postman and otherwise can send form data via curl, for example

You can use your browsers inspect and DEV mode and click in the WebUI to see what commands are being sent

formdata example
pfd_form_id=vsource&rtsp_url=&rtsp_username=&rtsp_password=&rtsp_transport=udp&video_hw_dec=on&video_ignore_color_range=&audio_delay=100&nosignal_src=&nosignal_timeout=