INGRID Link: remote video that survives a real connection

INGRID Link could already put INGRID’s camera view on a paired phone. The work since has been turning that from something that works when conditions are good into something that keeps working when they are not.

• The stream adapts to the connection. Remote video now runs its own quality ladder, independent of what the desktop is showing, so a weaker connection degrades smoothly instead of stalling. The cost of encoding each frame is measured rather than assumed, which is what makes the ladder respond to real conditions instead of a guess.
• A stalled camera recovers itself. Capture stalls are detected and recovered automatically, rather than leaving a frozen frame that looks like a working feed. A camera that has genuinely failed now says so instead of quietly showing the last image it managed.
• Returning to the app no longer kills a healthy stream. Bringing the phone back to the foreground used to tear down and rebuild the video connection unconditionally. It now checks whether the stream is actually unhealthy first, and leaves a working one alone.
• Proven by running it overnight, not by running it once. There is now a soak-test harness that exercises reconnection continuously and produces a health report, plus regression coverage for the specific reconnection race it was built to catch. A feature that survives one demo and a feature that survives eight hours are different claims, and only the second one is worth making.

This is remote viewing rather than remote control, and it stays inside a private network connection rather than the public internet.