🎥 This space is dedicated to fans of the ContaCam app and meant to be a landing page for anyone wishing to discuss ideas, raise issues or share use-cases and configurations with the ContaCam user community.
🐞 The ContaCam developer is right now on a tight schedule, for that reason, the app is temporarily in maintenance mode. It is unlikely that any new features will be added soon, but there may be patch releases to address minor bugs in the future. With that in mind, feel free to open issues in the Issues tab but don't expect much activity or resolution.
❓ For everything else that is not an actual bug, feel free to use the Discussions tab as a forum for asking questions and having conversations around various ContaCam related topics.
🙋 Before raising issues or asking questions however, please consult the excellent ℹ️ FAQ which address most concerns.

Tips and Tricks

Here are a few tweaks that I make to the app to make it more functional. If you have any tips you'd like to share, feel free to add them in the Discussions page and I will add it to this list.

To increase the Web UI session timeout and avoid logging in all the time, change a couple of PHP parameters as described here

To get a direct, no-login URL to your Web UI, use a URL in this form (remember to URL-encode any special characters in your password):

http://CONTACAM-PC1:PORT/?username=xxx&password=xxx

Similarly for an individual camera's feed:

http://CONTACAM-PC1:PORT/CAMERA_NAME/push.php?username=xxx&password=xxx

To troubleshoot any issues, look at the ContaCam log file (found under Settings -> View Log File)

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Contaware\ContaCam\log.txt

Also check the micro apache (mapache.exe) web server's log files for issues with starting the webserver. Those are stored in the same folder:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Contaware\ContaCam\httpd_log.txt

To get bigger live snapshot thumbnails in the Web UI, you can change the size in the Camera Advanced Settings page:

To get more animated gifs in the recorded history page of a Camera, you can change the grid size by editing the summarysnapshot.php file in C:\Program Files (x86)\ContaCam\microapache\htdocs

Around line 60: (change to 42 instead of the default 12)

// Max files per page, pages count and page offset
$max_per_page = 42

Around line 451: (change to 6 instead of the default 4)

$max_container_width = 6 * $min_grid_width; // 12 responsive thumbs: 4 x 3, 3 x 4, 2 x 6 and 1 x 12

In ContaCam's FAQ, there is a page that describes turning on/off multiple cameras via the command line using each camera's .bat file located in its corresponding folder. This is useful if you want to stop excessive network traffic or CPU usage temporarily.

For example you'd make a new .bat file that calls all those individual cameras .bat files like this:

@echo off
call "C:\ContaCam\My Camera 1\CAMERA.bat" off
call "C:\ContaCam\My Camera 2\CAMERA.bat" off
call "C:\ContaCam\My Camera 3\CAMERA.bat" off

However, each camera has a built in delay of about 3 or 4 seconds that can get annoying to wait or have to press the keyboard to bypass. Instead, you can make a .bat file (for example turn_all_cameras_off.bat) that calls each camera's corresponding .bat file in a new window (in parallel) so it keeps going without any delay like this:

start cmd.exe /c "C:\ContaCam\My Camera 1\CAMERA.bat" off
start cmd.exe /c "C:\ContaCam\My Camera 2\CAMERA.bat" off
start cmd.exe /c "C:\ContaCam\My Camera 3\CAMERA.bat" off

frakman1/ContaCam

Tips and Tricks