Unable to play video Please try again

[arlouser4321]

I have owned 1 Arlo Q and 5 Arlo Pro cameras for about a month now. The Arlo Pro cameras have worked perfectly. My problem is with the Arlo Q. It randomly becomes unresponsive and will display a message saying "Unable to play video. Please Try again." when you try to play live video.

When it does this, the ONLY way to get it back is to power cycle the device by physically unplugging it. I have tried resetting/resycing many times and the issue persists. WiFi signal is strong with a 300Mbps connection. From the logs on my access point I'm not seeing any evidence the camera is disconnecting from wifi. Its more like it's losing its connection to the Arlo servers. The fact that it simply won't reconnect without a powercycle is a deal breaker for me. We are using this as a baby monitoring camera right now and if I can't fix this issue its getting returned.  

Arlo Q is running firmware version 1.8.3.0_9926. Anyone have any suggestions before I return this?

[TomMac]

Have you done the factory reset?  ( hold the reset in for 10 sec till the led flashes , then resync )

[arlouser4321]

Yes I removed the device in my settings and re-added it, which is supposed to have the same affect at pushing the reset button.

[TomMac]

removing the device from settings is not the same as a reset... if you haven't done it , i suggest you try

[arlouser4321]

OK, I've reset the camera via the reset button and removed/readded it to my account. I'll report back here on the results. The issue is intermittent and I haven't found any way to reproduce it on demand.

[arlouser4321]

It happened again after the factory reset. I was viewing live video on my tablet of one of my Arlo Pro cameras when I tried to view live video on my phone of the Arlo Q. I got the message "Unable to Play. Please try again." My phone is using a seperate account that owns the Arlo Q while my tablet's account owns the Arlo Pro cameras.

When it does this, there is no other way to get the camera to respond again other than power cycling it by unplugging it. The restart button becomes greyed out in the Arlo Q's settings so the only option is to physically restart it. Any other suggestions? Sounds like this is a firmware bug but I'm not sure I have the patience to wait for a fix. I need a camera that works.

[JamesC]

arlouser4321,

Please contact the Arlo Support Team to further investigate this issue. You will find several options for contacting support in the provided link.

JamesC

[arlouser4321]

I just returned $900 worth of Arlo gear to the store after about 40 days of use. I was well past the return period where I purchased them but thankfully the store accepted my return after I explained my issues with this system. I owned the Arlo Pro 4 cam kit, 1 Arlo Pro add-on and 1 Arlo Q. The issues I had were common and many of them reported here on the forums. This system is a great idea with a poor implementation in my opinion. After extensive troubleshooting and testing I finally decided to throw in the towel. 

I believe that many of the issues with the Arlo system are caused by the fact that Netgear is using AWS eu-west-1 as their primary datacenter site. This was the deal breaker for me. WHY on earth do I have to connect to server in Dublin Ireland to do ANYTHING with my Arlo system. No wonder there's so much latency, lag, poor quality, pixelated video, general slowness, and disconnecting cameras so frequently. Netgear needs to disclose this to customers up front. I'm sure many people don't realize this. They assume that because Netgear is a US company that their data would be kept in the US. Netgear could improve the performance of this product greatly by simply changing their primary site to the USA where the majority of their customers are. They must be getting a hell of deal with Amazon to have their primary site in Ireland.

[Paul_FCCL]

I often wonder too about the servers location, availability, performance and speed. It is obviously a problem shown in the many unexplained lags/delays and unpredictability of camera operation. Sometimes it works good.....almost as expected, timely valid triggers and video recordings, other times NOT so. Camera does not "wake up" on time, recording begins a few seconds too late and end up with empty clips. Even worse, occasionally camera does not wake up at all, motion completely ignored. Thankfully not very often.

All the various scenarios experienced by same cameras, same location, same everything!

Sorry to hear you gave up, I thought about doing same earlier on but decided to stick with it. Netgear has been showing signs of many improvements, especially over last six months or so. Things ARE getting better, slowly but surely.

Paul

[arlouser4321]

I hope you're right and Netgear can improve the performance of these cameras over time. I think they do work reasonably well for a door camera or anything short-range. The best thing about the Arlos is the ease of installation. 

For me, I just decided to suck it up and make some cat6 runs to the camera locations I want so I can place 1080p POE cameras. 

[TomWho]

---

arlouser4321 wrote:

It happened again after the factory reset. I was viewing live video on my tablet of one of my Arlo Pro cameras when I tried to view live video on my phone of the Arlo Q. I got the message "Unable to Play. Please try again." My phone is using a seperate account that owns the Arlo Q while my tablet's account owns the Arlo Pro cameras.

When it does this, there is no other way to get the camera to respond again other than power cycling it by unplugging it. The restart button becomes greyed out in the Arlo Q's settings so the only option is to physically restart it. Any other suggestions? Sounds like this is a firmware bug but I'm not sure I have the patience to wait for a fix. I need a camera that works.

---

As a former electronics manufacturing engineer I think they got the whole system to work a few times under ideal conditions and started selling it. It fails so often it is not possible to say hardware or software. Probably both.