*Siqura Controls SDK

Owned by Tom Polman
Last updated: Sept 20, 2022
3 min read

Technical Article | TA-20200927-OV-16

Support Software | Siqura Controls SDK |

 

Note that the Siqura Controls SDK is End-of-Life. It was a free tool to view video from the Siqura video source equipment, and many other RTSP based video feeds. Since this SDK was free software, there was (and still is) no customer support available on it. However, this page sums up some of the mostly heard questions about the SDK.

  1. PC crashes after a few hours or days

  2. Picture in picture effects, and hanging pictures.

  3. Flashing video from multiple streams in one viewport.

  4. No smooth video at all

  5. All video stalls when I create an AVR instance

 

  1. PC crashes after a few hours or days

We have found the cause to be overheating quite often.
If your application uses one or more video receivers the cooling of
your system is important. The video decoding and rendering is a
heavy load. If the PC is positioned inside a cabinet where it cannot
get proper ventilation it will hang up eventually.

Programs to monitor your motherboard- and graphics card temperature are
available from many hardware vendors as well as in the open domain.

  1. Picture in picture effects, and hanging pictures.

Various problems in this category were reported and they were all solved
by upgrading the drivers of the video card. Those upgrades are freely
available on the internet.

Graphics driver updates are sometimes pretty unstable. For Windows XP (or
better) users we recommend making a system restore point before updating
the graphics drivers.

  1. Flashing video from multiple streams in one viewport.

See previous question.

  1. No smooth video at all

On some types of built-in graphics cards high performance video is not
feasible. This is not limited to competitively priced systems. Typically
a high-end server system is not designed for graphics performance. Most
dedicated graphics cards will do. We recommend the ATI and Nvidia brands.
Matrox cards, or the drivers supplied with it, are often problematic and
should be evaluated carefully before being put to operational use.

  1. All video stalls when I create an AVR instance

Some systems equipped with 'competitively priced' graphics hardware will
show this behavior. Typically laptops and high-end server systems. But
also on systems with more graphics capabilities the allocation of an AVR
is a demanding process. For high performance applications we recommend to
hide, not delete unused video receivers, and reuse them when the next
stream is to be received.

 

Known issues
=================================================================

The following issues have been identified:

  • If an AVR is deleted _while_ it is performing an RTSP negotiation,
    resources will be lost. Make your code listen to the a sync job result and
    only delete after completion of the connection request.

  • The audio processing may cause hangups when the AVR is deleted and recreated
    continuously. We recommend to disable audio processing unless audio is necessary