I have a little Panasonic BL-c131a CMOS mpeg4 camera w/server and the relatively good image quality when observed on its LAN is not lost when observed over Internet WAN. I also have a LTC CCD camera connected to a Q-See 9004 dvr running H.264. In comparing the two, there seems to be a lot of image quality loss with the latter equipment when going from LAN to WAN. I'd appreciate comments regarding how normal and/or typical this situation is and whether or not the difference is attributable to one system running jpeg4 compression and the other H.264. TIA

If I'm following your setup correctly, you're viewing the same stream on both LAN and WAN with the Panasonic... however with the Q-See, the system is likely providing different streams, recompressing the WAN stream for lower bandwidth, which naturally means lower quality. Are you using a browser for all tests, or remote client, or...?

LAN provides you with more bandwidth so the video quality is better and faster. On WAN you are limited to your upload speed for your ISP so your bandwidth is way slower so image quality and FPS is degraded to make up for it.

Sorry I wasn't more clear. The two cameras are located at two completely different locations. When I said LAN I was on-site for the checking, and when I said WAN I was at the other cameras site, 6o mi. away. For the Panasonic I'm using Panasonic's viewnetcam.com (via IE7) for access and I'm accessing the Q-See dvr with their D9-Viewer program. There's a fast 1800 Kbs adsl line at the Panasonic site and a 800 Kbs Roadrunner Lite connection at the Q-See site.

Most H264 DVR's remote video is low quality, especially the rock bottom priced ones like QSee. Hey, its higher compression for more frames over slower connections.

I don't think it's a factor of the line speed itself - the Q-See remote software probably recognizes when you're connecting via WAN and dials down the quality to accommodate. The Panasonic web viewer either doesn't know or doesn't care.

sounds like you answered your own question

So the described connection speed alone could make a significant difference? In that case I could move the little Panasonic "R2D2" wannabe to the site that has only a 800 Kbs connection and see what the difference is. btw - Since my original post on this thread I replaced the clunker LTC camera at that site with an SIR-4160. While the Samsung's video is noticeably better than the LTC, it is still not comparable to the very nice picture produced by the little Panasonic pet monitor. After laying out several hundred $ for the SIR-4160 that finding has me scratching my head for sure. Thanks for your comments.

It's unlikely that the slower uplink speed is DIRECTLY causing the lower quality. If anything, it would cause stutters and pauses in the video stream as the bitrate exceeded the available bandwidth. Unless the software on one side or the other had a way to measure the upstream speed, or had it configured by a user, it would have no way of knowing that there's only 800kbit available.

What's more likely is, as I've already stated, that the CLIENT software recognizes that you're connecting over a WAN (because you're NOT using a 192.168.* or 10.* or other reserved private IP range), and thus tells the server to use a lower-bitrate video feed. It's not likely to know what the server's upstream bandwidth is either, so it would just knock it down to something significantly lower, to strike a balance between quality and data rate.

You could have 10Mbit upstream available to the server, and it wouldn't make a difference in this case. Changing the camera itself would have nothing to do with it.

My bets on the quality is just crappy because its a cheap H264 budget DVR, I have used them and like other budget 4 channel DVRs (though the cheap h264 ones even worse quality) their remote video quality, lan or not, just sucks. But im not a gambling man these days so dont bet on me

Well, there's that too, but his main confusion seemed to be over the DVR showing different image quality on WAN vs. LAN, while the Panasonic camera looked the same either way.