A Closer Look

Taking a look at the camera, it is kept symetrical. This is no big surprise as it can be turned in any direction you wish. If Airlive manages to make this unit with a black casing, you may end up seeing it in a few action movies as it looks great, even in blue. Any camera suddenly following your every move in a room should be somewhat intimidating and the Airlive WL-5460CAM is no exception here.


The rear holds all the usual connections. On the left you will find the DC, 5V plug. In the middle there is the wireless antenna connection, which is of the usual kind found on routers. You may place a larger, stronger antenna instead, if needed. All the way to the right is a traditional Ethernet connection for a wired network. The front features two LEDs to denote power and status within the network.

Software

The included software is quite similar to that of the smaller Airlive WL-5400. The big technical differences are the remote pan and tilt function as well as the built-in microphone. We will not cover all the software, only the applications which are different to those of the WL-5400 will be looked upon further. If you wish to read up on the others, not covered, take a look at the WL-500 review here.


The CD autoruns the above menu as soon as it is inserted. Most of these items are self explanatory. We will cover FFDShow, AVISavior & IPVew Pro. The latter is also included in on the WL-5400 CD, but only the "LE" version, not the full fledged "PRO" variant.

IPView Pro

Setup Process:



IPView Pro serves the same purpose as the LE variant we looked at in the WL-5400 review. The major differences are the amount of cameras which can be accessed at the same time. The LE variant was limited to four, while the Pro can access up to a whooping 16. The interface looks completely different and the settings menu is displayed in the location where you would look at the video feed. The above image is just a cutout of that area.

AVISaver

The AVISaver application does not require a software, and starts right away when selected in the CD menu. Apparently it is used to fix the AVI files from recordings of the CSViewer, which the camera uses to record any surveillance of the WL-5460. There could be a need to fix the end of these files, as they may not be completed properly due to ongoing recording of surveillance. AVISaver is only guaranteed to work with these AVI files and no others.

ffdshow

ffdshow is something you may know as it is quite popular in certain circles. Wikipedia has the following summary of the application:

ffdshow is a media decoder and encoder mainly used for the fast and high-quality decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX, Xvid or FFmpeg MPEG-4) and AVC (H.264) formats, but supporting numerous other video and audio formats as well. It is free software released under the GPL license, runs on Windows and is implemented as a DirectShow decoding filter.

It is available as freeware and is licenced under the GNU licence. If you have ever installed a well known codec pack, odds are ffdshow has already been installed on your system. The installation below shows what to expect when installing the application.