Help: Routers and port forwarding
What's a router?
A router is a devices that "splits" your internet connection, so that more than one computer can use it.
When you sit at one of the computers, and requests a certain page or file somewhere on the web, the router will take your request, send it to the webserver, and get the result back to the same computer that requested it. Simple enough.
Why does it need to be configured?
The problem arises with video streaming and image server. In this case the request comes from the web, and when it reaches the router it will need to know which computer on its network that will handle the request:
This problem is solved by configuring "port forwarding" in the router. With port forwarding you tell the router that all requests from the web for video streaming should be forwarded to the computer with tincam running.
You need to set up port forwarding if you have a router, even if you have only one computer attached. Some dsl modems work essentially like a router, even though they only have one exit port, and you only can attach one computer. If so, you still need to setup port forwarding.
The router generally doesn't forward requests from the outside unless you explicitly ask it to, even if there's only one computer on it's network. This is a security measure called firewalling.
Finding the problem
If you have tincam running video streaming, and you can't view it from the web, it's very likely a router that is blocking the connection from the outside to the computer running tincam.
On the video streaming page in setup, there's a "Connection test" button, wich will tell you if the video stream can be viewed from the outside. If it gives you an error, then you need to setup port forwarding.
Setting up port forwarding
The connection test will give you three relevant pieces of information: Your external IP, your internal ip, and the port.
- The external IP is the IP address that your computer has on the internet. People on the internet will need to contact this IP to connect to your streaming or image server.
- The internal IP is the IP address that your computer has on the router's local network.
- Each service on the internet (web, mail, ftp) uses a specific port. TinCam's video streaming uses port 8080 by default, image server uses port 80 by default.
You will need to instruct you router that all traffic from the internet on this port should be forwarded to the internal IP of your TinCam computer. The traffic protocol is always TCP, if you need to select. How you set up port forwarding will depend on the brand of router. In my router software the setup looks like this:
You will need to replace my values (port 8080, IP 192.168.1.103) with the ones given to you by the connection tester.
Www.portforward.com has instructions for most routers. Find your router there, and follow the default guide - TinCam isn't on the list of software.