Issue with Surveillance Station 9.2.1-11380 Not Displaying Correct Time for Reolink Camera

Networking & Firewalls
1

I’m running Surveillance Station 9.2.1-11380 and experiencing an issue with one of my cameras not displaying the correct time in Live View. Here’s the setup and problem:

  • I have five Amcrest cameras, and their time synchronization works fine—they’re all within +/- 2 seconds of each other when viewed in Monitor Center.
  • I’ve enabled the “Sync” option in Monitor Center, and all cameras are configured to use Surveillance Station as the Network Time Server.
  • The issue is with my sixth camera, a Reolink model. While the Reolink camera itself keeps accurate time (+/- 2 seconds compared to the others), the time displayed in the Surveillance Station live feed is significantly off—sometimes by a minute or more. The time skew seems to worsen over time.

Here are the current settings for the Reolink camera in Surveillance Station:

  • Streaming information source: Streaming
  • Frame Time Correction: By Streaming

Despite these configurations, Surveillance Station fails to display the correct time for the Reolink feed in both the timestamp overlay and Live View.

Has anyone encountered this issue or have suggestions for resolving it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

Sounds like a bug in the camera firmware, I would check to see if there are any updates.

3

I have seen ntp clients having problems syncing and the client logs usually help. on a cam it is probably not that easy and you may have luck by watching the traffic e.g. using wireshark, often one can get much easier an idea what is going wrong by looking at the traffic.

4

Thank you for the suggestions. Going to take a look at all of those. I did set up some PF Sense fw rules to pass and log NTP traffic. I’m going to see something there too. Thanks again!!

5

I’d encourage you to use packet capture to look at the traffic in WIreshark. You can do this either by using Diagnostics > Packet capture on pfSense (and then download the PCAP file), or using the Wireshark live ssh feature. The display and breakdown is a lot clearer and more detailed in Wireshark. If you are not familiar with WIreshark I can assure you that the initial learning curve has a great pay-off. This is a skill that will save you lots of time when analysing network problems.

6

@LTS_Tom I haven’t checked if you have made a video on using Wireshark in practice for troubleshooting, and I know there are hundreds of such videos by others. It may still be worth having one made yourself that you want to point to as you know what you have done there in detail.