Hi @Charles,
I’m unfortunately not certain what each camera setting corresponds to directly, especially in terms of the specific values. From what I can tell the available settings are auto-detected from the camera, which makes documenting them somewhat difficult, but I agree it would be useful to have at least general descriptions so I’ve raised an issue for it here.
You can likely find out some useful information by searching online for “camera <setting name> setting”.
Exposure is the main camera setting that affects latency, because the camera can’t output a frame until it’s captured, and exposure determines how long each frame is sampled for. Ideally the auto-exposure setting would cap the exposure to values that can maintain the requested output framerate, but that doesn’t happen. If you set the exposure manually (set the “Exposure, Auto” dropdown to “Manual Mode”, and change the “Exposure (Absolute)” slider) then high values of exposure will significantly reduce the possible framerate (according to the previous link the maximum value results in a framerate as low as 1fps).
Frame size can affect latency a little bit, because a larger frame will take longer to send and decode than a smaller one.
Frame rate shouldn’t affect latency unless your network connection is bad/overloaded, or your topside computer is struggling to decode frames fast enough (in which case sending the frames a bit slower, or sending smaller frames, can be helpful). If you’re asking about this because of poor streaming performance I’d suggest you go through our video troubleshooting steps.
The default values of the camera and streaming settings are shown in the picture you copied, although I believe the “Exposure, Auto” defaults to “Aperture Priority Mode”, which is auto-exposure.
From what I can tell the “Exposure, Auto Priority” switch doesn’t actually do anything (so you can likely ignore it) - that functionality seems to be handled by the “Exposure, Auto” dropdown instead.
I believe this setting is a noise filter which helps to reduce signal noise from nearby mains electrical wiring. That’s most relevant when operating/testing the camera inside, and is most likely not relevant/helpful when powering the ROV with a battery and away from any mains power.
Gstreamer is the library/program we use for getting the camera stream from the companion computer to the top computer. The main options being used are in that box, and it’s generally not relevant to change them unless you’re doing something custom, which is good because the learning curve for gstreamer is quite steep. If you have a particular non-standard use-case in mind we can try to help, but we may not be able to help much outside of the components we already use in the companion computer. If you’re interested you’re welcome to look at the gstreamer documentation.
It’s particularly relevant to have access to the IP address and port that the camera stream is being sent to, especially for cases like streaming multiple cameras or controlling multiple ROVs on the same network.
