Port Forwarding
If the Server Connection Test fails, your Video Streaming Server or Image Server will not be accessible from the internet.
The most likely cause of this problem is a router, that does not forward the connection request to the computer with TinCam running. To solve this problem you will need to set up
port forwarding on your router.
What is port forwarding?
A router can make a single internet connection available to many computers. But when a computer on the internet tries to establish a connection to your computer through the router, the router will need to know which computer handles the request (even if only one computer uses the router).
Port forwarding instructs the router to forward a request to connect to your TinCam server to the right computer.
How do i set 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.
