I have a dashboard with multiple media tiles that I use to give me a preview of my camera feeds. These media tiles point to a low-res MJPG version of the camera stream. Occasionally I will notice that one of the tiles is not displaying a live feed, but it stuck displaying a still of the camera feed from some time in the past. When this happens, it’s usually only one tile, while the others are still displaying their streams live.
The stream itself is working fine. When I view the URL from the frozen tile directly in a browser, it displays the live picture correctly, but the tile remains stuck. The dashboard that contains these tiles does not display constantly, so all of the tiles should be getting a fresh connection to their respective streams each time the dashboard loads.
I have experimented with the auto-refresh option in the media tiles, and this does seem to fix the issue, but having lots of tiles auto-refresh every second to ensure that they are all displaying a live picture is not an elegant solution.
Is there another way I can get the media tiles to reliably show the live image and not get stuck?
It sounds like you’re on the right track with trying the Auto Refresh feature. Have you tried setting a long refresh period like every 30-60 minutes for the MJPEG streams?
That way most of the time you are just viewing the live streams without any refresh, but the periodic refresh can ‘jump start’ the stream if it dies.
Another option some people like is to use auto refresh with a JPEG Snapshot then set the Action (On Tap) of the Media Tile to directly open a live stream or even a video viewing app of your choice.
Will the auto-refresh work even if the dashboard containing those tiles is not being displayed? It is a secondary dashboard that is only navigated to when I want to see what’s on the cameras. If the auto-refresh timer stays active without the tile being on the currently displayed dashboard, that sounds like a good method.
The tile action is set to open a dashboard with a full-res version of the stream. This part works fine, it just looks odd to have the preview tile showing a nighttime scene while the full-size is daytime.
The timer for the Auto Refresh is only active while you are on the dashboard and the Media Tile is displayed. So if you navigate away from a dashboard, then the timer doesn’t exist anymore. But when you come back to the dashboard that has the Media Tile with an Auto Refresh set, the timer starts up again.
My apologies - I missed this part of your post during my first read through.
Am I understanding correctly that when you navigate from your main dashboard (with no camera streams), to the secondary dashboard with the camera streams that when the dashboard loads and the Media Tiles show up that one of the Media Tile streams sometimes shows an old frozen image?
That is correct. The tablet normally stays on the home dashboard, which has a link to the camera dashboard, which contains the media tiles. When I tap on the link to the camera dashboard, The media tiles load, but one (not always the same one) will sometimes show a frozen cached image from the last time the camera dashboard was viewed.
Navigating back to the home dashboard and then back to the camera dashboard does not resolve it, but if I temporarily change the tile’s action to “refresh media” and then tap it, it displays the real-time stream. Changing the action to “open media full screen” and then tapping it does not refresh and only displays the old still image in the larger pop-up.
However (here’s why I think it’s a cache issue), if, after refreshing the stream successfully, I go back to the home dashboard, then back into the camera dashboard, it still shows the old still image, even though it was streaming live a second ago.
I’m using Fully kiosk browser and the MJPEG streams are coming from a transcoding server using VLC’s VLM in broadcast mode to generate MJPEG streams using an RTSP source from a Reolink NVR.
Another piece of maybe relevant info - I have multiple tablets around the house and when this image freeze happens, it usually only affects one of them, or sometimes a different stream on a couple of tablets, but it is device-specific. Typically, when one tablet encounters a frozen media tile, that same tile on the other tablets works normally.
Usually only one tablet uses the camera dashboard at a time, so I don’t think it’s a concurrent request issue.
Is it possible to add a “refresh tiles on dashboard load” toggle in the dashboard configuration options? That would push a refresh action to all of the tiles once whenever the dashboard is loaded, but wouldn’t constantly refresh them like an auto-refresh would.
I disabled caching in FKB and turned on the option to flush the cache with every page load, but the frozen media tiles still persist, unfortunately. Refreshing the dashboard (either the camera dashboard or home dashboard) fixes it for that tablet.
As noted before, it’s not always the same camera feed or the same tablet experiencing this. This morning, I got lucky and had two tablets with frozen tiles (one tablet had several frozen), while the rest of the tablets were displaying normally. This allowed me to take some example pics.
The first pic is what it should look like (these were taken during the day). The next two pics have one or more tiles still showing night vision feeds from the previous night.
Tapping on any tile opens a new dashboard with only the feed from that camera. This works normally, and I have not seen any of the single-tile camera dashboards show frozen images.
