UPDATE:
I stopped by only briefly to the client late today but didn't have a lot of time. I just wanted to check a few things to try to get them going but set aside time tomorrow for another visit. Here's what we did today:
1) Reconfirmed that camera selection and switching between cameras manually right from the OT7 works fine. It's almost instant when we select the "thumbnail" view, and when the image is clicked for a full-screen render it takes maybe a half-second at most (i.e., we see the black "Establishing Connection" screen for a fraction of a second and then the camera image.) This works dead-reliably
every single time from any touchscreen and for any camera.
2) We disconnected the DVR and tested again, same performance.
3) We tried changing every variable on the PCA setup screen - changing MJPEG to JPEG, changing the FPS rate to as low as one, changing the quality to "low" or "medium", and even tried changing the resolution. None of these changes had any effect whatsoever on the reliability of the touchscreen connecting to the camera stream.
4) We tried each of the following format strings for the URL (changing MJPEG to JPEG where needed):
I've attached a partial screenshot of a few lines of the PCA Setup screen just to show how things were setup originally (before the changes noted above, and this is the configuration that otherwise works perfectly for manual selection from the touchscreens)
None of the above changed the problem. Directly from the touchscreens, the cameras access fine, but when triggered by logic events they connect maybe 1 in 10 times and if/when they do, it is only on some screens.
The only thing we did NOT do today is muck around with the network switch cabling. Even the high-end Cisco 50-port gigabit POE switch we installed, like most POE switches has only a partial # of ports that are actually POE and because of this and the vast # of POE devices on the network, we have the system split into two POE switches - one of which has the IP cameras on it, while the other one has the touchscreens and some other network equipment like access points, etc.
I don't know why it would matter, but when we go back tomorrow, we can try to put a camera and a touchscreen on the same physical POE switch and see if this has any impact. While the switches are "managed", they are in stock configuration and we have done nothing to set up any traffic rules, etc, so I would think that from an IP perspective all the connections are peer-to-peer regardless if they are on different physical switches. And besides, as mentioned, everything works perfectly when selected right from the touchscreen, it just doesn't work through events driven from PCAccess - so I can't see this as being a network fabric issue, or frankly even a bandwidth issue. It's very strange.
We'll be onsite tomorrow afternoon again. I warmly embrace any other ideas or suggestions for troubleshooting!
Many thanks,
Jcd