Not easy to set up good webcam with very good image but for the layman

I bought these web cam to monitor my floor. Not necessarily against burglary, although this is already happening, but rather also to my watch four cats. The camera is easy to connect and I had a very quick view in Internet Explorer. I have it connected near the router directly via LAN cable. This is recommended for the high image quality and the resulting high data rate also. It is more difficult if you want to see the images via the Internet from anywhere in the world. Here it took for me as tech savvy engineer some time until you have fought their way through the special terminology of port forwarding, public and private TCP ports and the difference between router IP address and IT address from the provider. We recommend the settings of a port above 8000, and in any case, the change in the administrator name and to set a password so that no one can access from the outside to the camera. Relevant information can also be found on the US side of Foscam. (Foscam.us) To monitor the images of the road on iPhone or iPad, I recommend the app "Live Cams Pro" from Eggmanstechnology.com.
Here you can integrate the private camera very good and you can use all functions on the iPhone or iPad. The Bwegen the camera or the use of preset positions and the acoustic monitoring is no problem. When setting the password on the camera should be noted however, that the password must not contain special characters. The software version 3.5.7 the app is still a bug! After consultation with the developer of this bug is fixed in version 3.5.8. I have therefore set short password without special characters. After that, everything worked flawlessly. (With special characters in the password worked the preset positions not. Everything else worked just fine). In the motion detection works now properly. That was a challenge, particularly in conjunction with my four cats. But you can in the camera setting appropriate areas hide the not to take into account the motion detection. I have hidden the whole lower part of the floor and the large living room table, the cats often exceed. For this one must also set the appropriate e-mail address and SMTP ports in the settings. Here I experienced a little surprise that I can not explain to me still. The settings that I have in my email client I had completely taken over initially. With these settings, the routing does not work. I then changed the settings of the SMTP ports to 25. (Actually, port 995). Another information that may be of interest to one or the other might: One can in the camera over a sort of calendar enable times of the week in which the motion detection is activated. This is so far not particularly effective if one has an imagined time window, for example, 7:00 bis 17:00 clock clock set. If you then belatedly and only at 19:00 clock comes home is the camera from 17:00 bis 19:00 clock clock not active. The camera software here offers no way to connect them quickly to active or inactive. One must then access the camera always on the menu control in Internet Explorer, or Safari. This is a bit cumbersome. However, the app live cams per provides the opportunity the motion detection with a simple click active or inactive switch.
I highly recommend this camera fully. For this price, it offers a very good performance. There are certainly still a lot of room for improvement to the software. But for my purposes it is sufficient. At the moment it is for me something unintelligible as the firmware of this camera is to be kept up to date. Here contradict something different forums in America and in Germany. The manual says when the camera is working correctly you should not bring the firmware up to date. So I can also enable any additional features or incorporate optimizations. On the German website of foscam still can not download it. On the US side but you will also find the relevant information that you should be very careful to match the firmware and hardware. All in all, one has the impression that a firmware update is associated with a very high risk.
Nevertheless unlimited purchase recommendation.