--- title: "When a baby monitor feed freezes: what Cribbit shows you" description: "A frozen nursery picture looks exactly like a sleeping baby. Cribbit monitors every frame's timestamp and tells you Live, Stalled or Lost instead." date: "2026-10-20" app: cribbit readingTime: "5 min read" image: "/img/build/cribbit/iphone-monitor-frog.jpg" imageAlt: "Cribbit's parent monitor on iPhone with the frog shown while no video is sent" --- A frozen video frame looks exactly like a sleeping baby. That is the failure mode no baby monitor app talks about: the feed stops, the last frame sits there, and you have no way to tell whether the room is still quiet or the camera has been dark for ten minutes. Cribbit addresses this with a specific mechanism. Every frame the nursery camera sends carries the exact moment it was captured. The parent phone is not just playing back video — it is checking whether those timestamps are still advancing. If they stop, the status changes. You know within seconds, not when you walk in to check. ## The three states The parent monitor always shows one of three connection states: Live, Stalled or Lost. **Live** means frames are arriving and their timestamps are current. The camera is running, the connection is healthy, and the room is being monitored in real time. **Stalled** means frames have stopped arriving, or their timestamps have stopped advancing. The last frame you saw is still on screen — it looks like a live feed. But it is not. The most common causes are the nursery phone's screen locking, the nursery app being sent to the background, or a brief interruption in the Wi-Fi connection. The picture looks the same. The status does not. **Lost** means the connection between the two devices has dropped entirely. The feed goes blank and the label changes. Stalled is the failure mode that matters most. Lost is obvious — you notice when the screen goes dark. Stalled is invisible on a monitor that does not track it. The image on screen looks normal. The room appears calm. But you are watching a photograph, not a camera. ## Why this problem exists on other monitors Most cloud-connected baby monitors do not show you whether the frame you are looking at is current. They display video — or the last frame they received — with no indication that anything has stopped. The app stays open, the image sits there, the monitor looks fine. Cloud architecture makes this harder to fix. The stream travels from the nursery camera through a server before reaching the parent phone. Detecting whether the feed is live requires the server to track timestamps and relay status back to the app in real time. Some products do this. Many do not. When they do not, a frozen frame and a live quiet room look identical until you check in person. Cribbit does not have a server. The two phones connect directly. Frame timestamps travel with the video and are checked locally on the parent phone, without any relay. The detection is continuous. The status reflects what is actually happening in the room right now. ![iPad onboarding screen headed "No router. No cloud. No account."](/img/build/cribbit/ipad-onboarding.jpg) *The iPad onboarding screen: "No router. No cloud. No account."* ## Sound continues when video stalls When the nursery phone's screen locks or the app is sent to the background, video stops. iOS requires the camera to stay in the foreground — it does not allow apps to access the camera while backgrounded. Frames stop arriving, and the status shifts to Stalled. What does not stop is audio. iOS lets apps capture audio in the background, so sound monitoring and cry detection keep running on the nursery device even with the screen locked. Alerts still reach the parent phone. Stalled means you have lost the video; it does not mean you have lost the room. The paid unlock includes background listening on the parent side: the parent phone keeps receiving audio with its own screen off or while you use other apps. That is what lets you put the phone face-down on the nightstand and still hear the room overnight. ![Cribbit's "What can you hear?" sound tuning screen](/img/build/cribbit/iphone-listening.jpg) *The "What can you hear?" screen, where the classifier learns the room's normal noise level.* ## Keeping the feed live Stalled during a monitoring session almost always traces back to the nursery phone's screen locking. The fix is the same every time: set Auto-Lock to Never in Display & Brightness before you start monitoring, and keep the nursery phone plugged in. Running the camera with the screen on for a full night will drain most batteries before morning — the charging cable is part of the setup, not an afterthought. If the screen does lock mid-session, unlocking it and returning to Cribbit is enough to resume. Frames start arriving again, and the status returns to Live. ## What you can see at a glance The parent monitor shows a frog character alongside the status label. The two pieces of information are visible at the same size — you have the plain-text word and the visual indicator at once. The status label reads Live, Stalled or Lost. Picture in Picture, part of the paid unlock, keeps the nursery feed visible while you use other apps on the parent phone, so you do not need to switch back to check on the room. The full monitoring view also shows the room's sound level. That number and the connection status are what let you know, without going to the nursery, whether the room is quiet and being watched, quiet but not being watched, or no longer connected at all. --- Cribbit is in TestFlight beta. Visit [cribbit.xeve.io](https://cribbit.xeve.io) to try it free.