DS cam Reviews

I am using this app for 4 years now and it had its up and downs but for almost a year now it stops working after about an hour. I have my ipad on the wall and this app us running 24/7 but now after about an hour the picture freezes and all i can do is end DScam and restarts. Very frustrating. I am using the latest IOS. Not for professional use. If you check from time to time on your cameras than you might be happy with this program

Absolutely useless product! There is no way to turn off event notifications to individual cameras. The download feature isn’t compatible with iOS due to imcompatible file type, so I don’t know why the option to download even exist. This overprice NAS is constantly locking up and requires endless restarts. I can’t return the Synology DS because the licenses are not returnable and made up for the bulk of the price. Also, found out after the fact when I bought this junk that the parent company is located china. I’m pretty sure the CCP have back door access to the NAS. Stay away from Synology!

I used to be able to use DScam with no issues. Now after exiting DScam and going back in I get the following error. The ssl certificate of the disk station is not trusted. I have now click on ok and click my account to log back in every single time. It NEVER used to do this until about a few months ago. Nothing has changed. I even contacted support and their resolution is to disable https. Really?? Very disappointed.

Needs a “stop manual recording” button. Needs an obvious way to stop ANY manual recording. Pre-set manual recording times are convenient. A scroll wheel to set a duration would be great. Distinguish auto recording from manual recording with different icon. •rec vs •rec[M]

Thanks for the fast response. Please note I have asked for an OBVIOUS stop manual recording button. As you state, there may be a way to stop a recording but it is not easy to find. Make it easier please.

App works well enough, but has a puzzling UI decision to dim the view of any selected camera for a few seconds while showing a pause overlay. This keeps you from quickly pulling up a camera and zooming in on something, because you have to wait for the overlay to go away.

Unlike many other surveillance apps, this one (in combination with the appliance, of course) is actually useful. I can tell that some thought went into the UI design.

I am desperately missing a way to quickly switch between cameras when looking at a camera in full screen. I should j just be able to swipe left/right instead of the three taps that are currently required. I would also like the play head to stay when I switch from full screen to multi view. Currently, the play head position is reverted back to the position from before entering full screen.

I left Surveillance Station last year because DScam has lacking a lot of key features.

Today I decided to give it another try because I liked how organized everything was on my NAS sticking with the synology apps and I really don’t want to continue to run a separate docker instance.

I have to say I was presently surprise at the updates to the mobile app!
Why not 5 stars? - I have not fully checked out all the features but so far it looks like it meets all of my needs now.
I will update when I do!

As a developer, I understand the work that goes into these features. It’s a thankless job!

To the developers- Well done!
I have been spinning up docker containers testing other software (xeoma, blue iris, zoneminder, and more) and I feel like you guys now have the most complete package.

I would say the only features I feel is missing is a way to add more licenses without waiting for the hard license to arrive.
At a minimum, maybe give us the ability to add the camera in a trial mode until the keys arrive.

Keep up the great work!

First, DS Cam works very well with my new Reolink cameras. Even better than the manufacturers camera app. Well done Synology team.

But their are a few privacy and functional issues I hope you guys can address that should be an easy fix. When I go to take a snapshot or download a video recording directly to my Photos app it asks for full photos access, which is not needed and a privacy risk. It should allow to save with photos privacy option selected photos only but gives the pop up "Error Please go to iOS Settings to allow DS cam to access your photo library.”

Also there is an issue with the home button being disabled in the playback screen and I have to drag the home bar up to the middle of my screen to get out.

Also no two way talk and the PTZ function does not work. Please fix these issues and I think it would be a perfect app.

Thanks.

Using app for a few years. There is a minor issue with small phone screens: the ‘camera info’ window has a screen wrap issue when 1920x1080 is used, compared to 1280x720. Has to do with length of text to display 1920x1080 vs 1280x720. To fix: Software guys need to change line header from: “Video Reso:” to “Video Res:” and the problem will go away! This is not seen on larger phone screens or iPads, just smaller screens.

Overall I really do enjoy DScam and Synology SS. The notification and viewing functions work as expected.
Previously I was on a cloud based camera system. Not to name names, but it got really old having constant subscription ads not to mention the delay in loading live video. Sometimes 60+ seconds and by then the detected event was over.

Problem solved with Synology SS and DScam.
Connecting over the LAN or WAN is extremely fast. (assuming you have solid internet service)

The only complaint I have is that I have 4K cameras which require a lot of bandwidth to view. You can specify a secondary stream profile for mobile viewing at a lower resolution which works fantastic for live viewing.
However if you try and replay an event, it replays at the higher recording resolution which is a issue on limited mobile bandwidth.

It would be nice if they would add a streaming transcoder function to lower the resolution when needed on playback.

Or add a option to record video at two different resolutions and allow you to switch between the two.

I know I could lower the recording resolution. But that defeats the purpose of the high resolution cameras if I ever needed the video as evidence.

I had moved about a year ago and today I set my surveillance station back up using Reolink RLC-422 cameras. BOY has the optioned changed on this application, makes it super user friendly. As long as you know what you are doing you can create a camera recording system interface that is way above a anything else. I am an electrical engineer and spent the last couple of weeks integrating a 80k Pelco camera system with our existing one so I know what a user interface should look like. To the developers, thank you so much for putting in the time and making this what it is. Btw, I have had an iPhone since basically day one and this is my first review. Your effort has not gone unnoticed, it’s now time to advertise! Make this a standard!

This has always been a great app, but was initially broken on the ios 14 update. The developers quickly updated DScam and it works fine now, thanks developers! DScam is first class for being able to view security camera footage, and I can quickly review footage and see live events. The quality of DS Cam and the other DS iphone applications is one of the reasons I stick with Synology for my NAS and surveillance cameras.

Great app to see what’s going on remote. Use it local when at the house and away. Has a great method to switch between different addresses (for example local IP vs public IP when your not home). My wife uses it as well and she’s as computer savvy as a boomer . Would love to continue to see more features added but what’s there is good and has always worked for me

5.4.1 update fixed all these issues. Thanks dev team for fixing. I don’t like the extra width for short event recordings but I can live with it. Wish it was configurable.
Old review: New 5.4 update breaks numerous things. Recorded events now all appear very thick instead of correct thin size (no it’s not an issue with how expanded the timeline is). When playing back recordings, it no longer continues to the next clip, it just locks up. You can’t even press next clip or drag around, it remains locked. Relaunch app, reboot phone, no change. Opened support ticket and they want diagnostics run on NAS!!! Uh guys, the update is bad. I have a second phone with previous version - still no issues, works like it always did.

There are some nice improvements in version 5.3 (see vendor’s list). However, I miss seeing the integrated list of “recordings” from all cameras that was easily viewed in the previous version.

UPDATE: The recordings list is back in rev 5.3.1 ! Thank you to the software folks for restoring this feature.

Ive been using this for 18 months and It suits my needs fine. Im pretty low maintenance with my needs, I run 8 POE cameras and have no issues. I had disconnect issues in the beginning but realized I needed to have static IP addresses so my cameras would stop getting diff IPs during power outages. Since making that change in my configuration all has been good. Also, set playback quality to Low so you are not trying to send high quality video to your tiny mobile screen. Took me another minute to figure out why my mobile would bog down, it was due to 8 cameras of high quality video coming in at same time. Now all is smooth and has been fitting my needs for some time with no issues for me. Your results may vary.

After DScam keep on crashing reached out to support and the fix was going into strings and disabling hardware decode and back to working better than before. Much smoother with the setting off. Thank you support for getting back to me. I depend on DScam daily.

Changing review from 1 to 5 star. Developer fixed the problems. Thank you. I am very happy with my Synology NAS and having our surveillance cameras running on it is just great. No outside storage fee and compatible with all cameras we tried. Not as slick as Nest but also no cost besides a one time license. So overall a great choice.

Wont work on iphone 14 max pro, I even added a new user and tried everything but still crushed my iphone 14 every time when I try log in.
Update: we updated to latest 16.0.3, and everything is fine now. Thanks, mysterious developer

DScam had an issue with iOS 14.1 beta. I left a pretty harsh review and the developer helped me with updating to the latest beta and now everything works. Sorry for the initial bad review, but thank you for reading it, responding, and helping me upgrade to fix my issues!