Hi again, well I guess let's try to fix one thing at a time!
If you're not seeing a sync message on one of the clients, then that's a problem. That suggests to me that the client isn't seeing the server messages, so there will be no synchronisation. The default broadcast address is 239.255.255.250 (though you can alter it in the camera tuning file), so maybe worth checking that the client can pick up packets from the server on that address outside the camera system? You can get more sync-related debug if you run with LIBCAMERA_LOG_LEVELS=RPiSync:0 on the client, which should tell you if it's seeing anything (on the server, it will tell you when it broadcasts the timing messages).
On the other question, if you have many synced cameras running, you have a risk of frame drops from all the different cameras occurring randomly. Now, 99.9%, and at moderate framerates probably 99.99% of the time, you won't get frame drops but you probably do want to have a plan - because a frame drop on one camera will make it out of sync with all the others. I'd be tempted possibly to record the wall clock time of every frame that you capture, and then maybe you can match them up later? Obviously it will all depend on your exact use case too.
If you're not seeing a sync message on one of the clients, then that's a problem. That suggests to me that the client isn't seeing the server messages, so there will be no synchronisation. The default broadcast address is 239.255.255.250 (though you can alter it in the camera tuning file), so maybe worth checking that the client can pick up packets from the server on that address outside the camera system? You can get more sync-related debug if you run with LIBCAMERA_LOG_LEVELS=RPiSync:0 on the client, which should tell you if it's seeing anything (on the server, it will tell you when it broadcasts the timing messages).
On the other question, if you have many synced cameras running, you have a risk of frame drops from all the different cameras occurring randomly. Now, 99.9%, and at moderate framerates probably 99.99% of the time, you won't get frame drops but you probably do want to have a plan - because a frame drop on one camera will make it out of sync with all the others. I'd be tempted possibly to record the wall clock time of every frame that you capture, and then maybe you can match them up later? Obviously it will all depend on your exact use case too.
Statistics: Posted by therealdavidp — Tue May 27, 2025 8:14 am