Support / The scan finishes and finds nothing
No cameras answered the scan
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What the app did
It sent a discovery probe to the network (WS-Discovery), listened for cameras announcing themselves (SSDP), and then knocked on every address on the network on the three ports cameras usually use. All of that came back empty.
Nothing answering is a statement about the network between the phone and the cameras, not about the cameras being broken. Five reasons cover almost every case.
What to check, in order
- Is the camera on, and plugged into the same network? Powered up, and on the wired network or the Wi-Fi the phone is on — not only paired to a different one in the same building.
- Which network is this phone on? Guest Wi-Fi, or a second network name, puts the phone somewhere the cameras are not. Join the one the cameras use.
- Cameras on a separate network. Installers often put cameras on their own VLAN. A scan only reaches the segment the phone is on, so those cameras are not found — but they may still be reachable by address if the router routes between the two. Ask for a camera’s address and type it in; if that does not work either, the router is not passing traffic between the two networks, or a firewall on it is not.
- The router keeps devices apart. Many routers have “client isolation” or “AP isolation”, which hides devices from each other on Wi-Fi. It is a setting on the router, not on the camera, and it has to be turned off for the phone to reach anything.
- The camera does not announce itself. Some never do, and on some ONVIF discovery has been switched off years ago. Type its address; ViewTile connects to it directly.
What the app shows
When nothing answered, the scan screen lists these five things in this order. When the scan was stopped early, it says so instead — a scan that did not finish has not answered the question.