Support / The phone is warm after a while on the wall, and the battery drops faster than usual
The phone gets warm, and the battery goes fast
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Why
Video is expensive to decode. Four cameras on the wall are four streams being received over Wi-Fi and turned into pictures sixty times a second; that is the same work as playing four videos at once. Warmth and a faster-draining battery are normal for that, on any phone, in any app.
What ViewTile already does
- The wall uses the lighter picture from each camera, not the full one — a quarter of the work or less.
- A camera you are not looking at is not decoded: when you open one camera full screen, the others stop.
- Listen plays the sound of a camera without decoding or drawing its picture at all.
- The screen is kept awake only while a picture is actually playing.
What you can do
- Plug it in when the phone or tablet is a wall display. A tablet on a stand at the counter should be on its charger.
- Lower the brightness — on a phone the screen usually costs more than the video.
- Use the wall with pages rather than the biggest grid: on a tablet or a Mac, a 3×3 or 4×4 wall decodes nine or sixteen streams at once, while twelve cameras through pages of four decode only four. Fewer tiles, less heat.
- Check the cameras’ bitrates. A camera sending its lighter stream at a high bitrate makes the phone work for nothing; 512 kbps to 1 Mbps is plenty for a tile. Set it on the camera’s page under Configure › Stream.
- Leave the app when you are not watching. A wall left open in a pocket is four streams for nobody.
A television or a plugged-in tablet is the right screen for watching all day; the phone is for the walk-round and the call-out.