My wish list

[nunuvyurbiz]

I love the technology behind detecting people, not motion (I have a tree above the view in one camera, and the wind causes the shadow on the ground to change rapidly, which gets detected as "motion"), and crossing lines and other boundaries. Here's my wish list:

1. Built in web server with built-in SSL, and no Flash. Instead of developing apps for iOS, etc., use a rapid-start streaming web server (see SecuritySpy), that does not require flash. Death to flash! Note, for all apps and any web serving, minimal delay between action and view is important (SecuritySpy is good in this regard - near real-time, EvoCam not so much.) EDIT: It's a kludge, but as a workaround maybe I'll just remotely connect via TeamViewer and/or Apple Remote Desktop.

2. Barring that, a full featured iPad app.

3. Full screen or screensaver mode.

4. Ability to mask off certain areas to record in the video still but ignore for detection purposes. This isn't such a big deal, because you can filter your search to just the rule, but still. As an aside, I get a lot of cars crossing in front of the camera (street is in view, past the front of the house) and they get detected as people.

5. Improvements minimizing CPU use are always appreciated. SecuritySpy is pretty good this way. EvoCam is awful once you go past one "canvas."

6. More licensing options. Going from $60 for two cameras to $250 for unlimited is quite a leap. Makes that third camera license $190! Why not just say it's $x/camera up to a limit of $y, after which it's unlimited?

7. Per-function and per-camera settings. For example, high compression for web serving, but low compression for local storage. (Better yet, have it detect your upload speed and have it adjust. In fact, that makes the most sense. That way, if you're viewing only one stream, it can be high res/framerate, but if you are viewing four it would drop down the res/framerate.) Low framerate without anything detected, high framerate when something is detected.

8. Ability to view the live view while reviewing events.

[ryan]

Thanks for the feature requests! With regard to #4, I just want to make sure you're aware that you can often accomplish mask functionality by creating a rule with an "outside" type region. Any objects that only ever appear within that region will not trigger a match. Those objects would still be picked up by other rules of course.

[nunuvyurbiz]

Let me make sure I understand. My only rule is people that cross a boundary. I don't get false positives on that.

When I go to review events, I can limit it to that one rule, so that's great.

If I select all people, however, it shows everything in the entire scene that it thought was a person, whether or not it triggered my rule. That seems to be automatic, not based on my rule.

If I mask as you suggest, by creating a rule to look for people (or objects) outside a certain area (e.g., not the street), will that stop the automatic detections of people inside the walled area?

It seems me that the system would still collect the detections anywhere in the scene, no?

Granted, it doesn't take more drive space, since it's just marked on the video stream.

[ryan]

Sounds like you understand it, but I'll go into detail in case there is any confusion or someone else finds this post:

Probably easiest to start by saying that rules are lightweight, and you can have as many as you'd like. They don't add any extra stress to the system unless they have a response attached to them in which case they are run in real time against the feed to check if they need to perform the specified response.

In the search view rules just search across whatever video is present on the system, both temporary (defined by the "Temporarily keep all video for X hours" setting in preference/options) and segments that were marked to be saved by a rule. The "All objects" or "People" rules are simply default searches across all cameras for these items so will always show anything found anywhere in the scene.

If you select your custom rule you should only see the information you care about based on that query. If you had a region over the top right quarter of the frame with type "outside", when selecting that rule you would only see clips with objects that were at some point outside that region. Anything fully contained in that region would not generate a clip.

By default when you add a camera a rule is added with a save response called "Any object in cameraName". You may want to edit this rule for the camera you're trying to ignore events on and make it an 'outside some region' as described above. Then objects that only existed in the street would not be persisted past the temporary video duration, and wouldn't show up in any search on days beyond that time point. If you *really* wanted to get rid of them, and trusted the system not missing anything you might care about, you could drop your temporary video duration down to 1 hour, which would also have the side effect of almost entirely using your disk space for clips you care about rather than temporary video.

A lot in this post, hope it made sense, let us know if you have any other questions.

[tkollmann1000]

Another wish list add. Maybe this is somewhere buried in the software but is there a way to set a timer on an action when an event is triggered. For instance when a person is detected, it sends out an email, could there be a timer set as to when a similar event triggers another email? If someone is walking around or rain is triggering an event I get a lot of alerts? Can this be filtered somehow?

[ryan]

@tkollmann1000 - there isn't at the moment but there will be in the upcoming release.

[Walt Dockery]

@tkollmann1000 - there isn't at the moment but there will be in the upcoming release.

Great news!

This is my single biggest complaint about Sighthound. Lawn guys show up and trigger hundreds of emails per hour.

Any color as far as when the next update will be coming?

[ryan]

2.3 was released earlier today.