@LYNC-SmartHome
We typically see anywhere from a 5 to 15 second delay in the camera streams. Unfortunately lowering the resolution does not always have any significant impact to this delay. The delay time also seems to vary between camera manufacturers. For example the Dahua/Amcrest cameras seem to only lag 5-6 seconds while Hikvision and many others are 10-15.
We believe there are two underlying issues in play. First, we have tested the streams using desktop computers using VLC and FFPLAY (FFMPEG) and see almost no delay. However when using these tools directly on lower powered ARM devices such as a Raspberry Pi, we do see some amount of latency. So I think the lower powered hardware and likely decoding capabilities of the Alexa devices are limited and causing most of the latency. Second we think the Alexa devices are also buffering a few seconds of the stream before beginning the playback to better handle small hiccups that might be encountered in normal playback.
These are just observations … nothing confirmed with absolute certainly. In some cases, if the camera supports it, disabling the audio channel in the camera’s internal settings can help reduce some of the latency.
Thanks, Robert
