IF you use the Surveillance Station application on your Synology NAS to monitor one or more CCTV cameras, you may have been (or soon will have!) problems with the “live view” and “Timeline” tools ability to show you the actual footage from the cameras! All the other controls work, you can check the logs, change settings, but you can’t SEE the images.

A few months ago Chrome stopped supporting one of the important elements of the Surveillance Plugin. This week, Firefox on my machine updated itself and now the addin won’t load. Annoyingly, it doesn’t’ SAY it won’t load, and it doesn’t SAY what to do about it, it just tells me to download and install it but, it already is!

The only browser I have now that supports the system is Internet Explorer, something I hardly ever use!

It turns out, and for the life of me I don’t know why Synology didn’t arrange for the web control panel app to inform me of this, that there is a new stand-alone (i.e. doesn’t run in a browser at ALL) app called “Desktop Client”. it looks and works exactly like the web-control-panel did when it worked, but it’s installed as an application in its own right.  It had the added advantage that you can just log in to the app, you dont’ have to launch DSM first, wait for it to load all the windows you don’t want and close them again and THEN launch the SS control panel.

You can download it here

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/support/download/NVR216

You can also of course still use DS-CAM on Android and IOS devices to monitor camera feeds.