Why is my webcam feed laggy on OctoPrint Anywhere dashboard?

Free account

If you have a free OctoPrint Anywhere account, your webcam feed will be streaming at up to 1 frame every 3 seconds. We know this is much slower than what we previously offered, and hardly an awesome user experience. Check out this annoucement for the reasons behind reducing streaming frame rate for free users.

Follow these steps if your webcam is streaming at much lower rate than 1 frame every 3 seconds:

1. Is your printer printing? OctoPrint Anywhere streams at much lower rate when your printer is idle, for the purpose of reducing bandwidth usage and making it less stressful for your home router. The frame rate will automatically pick up once the printer starts to print.

2. Make sure your Raspberry Pi has a reliable and fast internet connection.

PRO account

If you want a faster and much smoother webcam video streaming, you can upgrade to PRO account with little more than 1 cup of coffee per month. The reason why we'd like you to upgrade to get 25 frame-per-second streaming is because video encoding incurs significant cloud hosting cost. If you have already upgraded, THANK YOU! Your subscription has helped us make OctoPrint Anywhere the best webcam streaming service for 3D printers (we left Polar Cloud and AstroPrint in the dust!).

If you have a PRO account and you are not getting 25 frames per second video streaming, read on.

The most common cause for this problem is that PRO account's 25 frame-per-second webcam streaming only works with Pi Camera (the ones with CSi interface such as this one). If you have a USB camera instead, your webcam will be streaming at about 2 frames per second. It is 6x faster than a free account, and the highest frame rate without killing the Pi's CPU.

If you have a Pi Camera, follow these steps to figure out why you are having a laggy streaming:

1. Make sure the Pi Camera is securely connected to the Rasbperry Pi. The ribbon cable can be a little tricky to connect...

2. Make sure you have restarted OctoPrint after you upgrade to PRO or start the 1-month free trial.

3. Check to make sure your Raspberry Pi has a good internet connection.

4. Make sure you can see the webcam feed in OctoPrint (not OctoPrint Anywhere).

If you have gone through all these troubleshooting steps and still can't the webcamm to stream at 25 frames per second, please reach out to us for help!