Understanding Camera Streams and Status
Every camera you add to AI Live Insight shows up as a camera stream: a live IP feed, pulled into the portal over RTSP, sitting as a tile you can watch, organize, and open. Put enough of them together and the Camera Streams page becomes your wall of cameras, the place you start from whether you're keeping an eye on a quiet site or chasing down what a feed just caught.
This article explains what a camera stream is, how the page is laid out, and what a camera's status is telling you at any moment.
What a Camera Stream Is
A camera stream is the live connection between one physical IP camera and the portal. When you add a camera, AI Live Insight connects to it over RTSP, brings the feed in, and represents it as a tile under Library > Surveillance > Cameras. From that tile you can watch the live thumbnail, see the camera's current status, and open it in the player for a closer look or to review what it recorded.
Each stream stands on its own. It has its own connection details, its own detection and alert settings, and its own recordings, so what you configure on one camera doesn't spill onto the next.
Finding Your Way Around the Camera Streams Page
The Camera Streams page shows every camera you have access to, and it's built for both the quick glance and the deep search.
- Switch between Thumb View, which shows a live thumbnail for each camera, and a list view that trades the picture for denser detail.
- Use the column control to fit more or fewer cameras per row, so you can pack the screen or spread it out.
- Sort and search to pull a single camera out of a long list by title.
- Select Add Camera to bring in a new feed, or Create Folder to start grouping.
Organizing Cameras Into Folders
A handful of cameras is easy to scan. A few hundred is not, which is where folders earn their keep. Group cameras the way your deployment is actually laid out, for example one folder per building, floor, or site, and navigate into a folder to focus on just those cameras. Folders also keep related cameras together when you assign access, so the people who watch the loading dock aren't wading through every camera in the portal.
Reading Camera Status
A camera is only useful while it's actually streaming, so every tile shows a status that tells you, at a glance, whether the feed is healthy. A camera is always in one of three states.
| Status | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Online | The camera is connected and streaming live video. | Nothing. The feed is healthy. |
| Reconnecting | The connection dropped and the system is working to restore the stream on its own. | Wait a moment. If it doesn't recover, check the camera and the network. |
| Offline | The camera isn't streaming. It may be turned off, unreachable on the network, or quarantined after repeated failures. | Check the camera's power, network, and connection details. |
Status isn't something you refresh by hand. As cameras connect, drop, and recover, their status updates on its own, so what you see on the tile is the live state, not a stale snapshot from when the page loaded.
Watching Status Across the Fleet
Reading one tile at a time is fine for a handful of cameras. To judge the health of the whole deployment at once, the Operator Dashboard rolls every camera's status into a single fleet view, with running counts of how many are online, reconnecting, and offline. When a cluster of cameras goes offline together, that's usually the fastest place to catch it. To learn how that view works, see Understanding the Operator Dashboard.