Camera Offline Notification

[Blizaine]

It'd be great if you could right click on a camera and enable a notification if the camera goes offline. We had a camera go offline and didn't know until we needed to go view some footage and the camera wasn't there.

[ryan]

Hi Blizaine,

Thanks for the feature request, this would be a great addition to the software, Let us know if you have any other suggestions in the future or if we can assist with anything.

Best,
- ryan

[vandanazoe]

Would like to add a +1 - this is a really critical feature. The recording software does me no good if a camera is offline all weekend (which it just was) and I have no way of knowing. An email after the camera has been offline for 15 minutes is needed. Thanks!

[webloader]

I would say it is more than a feature request, it is almost a bug that cameras going offline are not detected. I have just had the same issue, some suspicious activity that was caught on one of my cameras but the camera that covered the area in detail was in its 'grey screen' mode. I have seen this a few times with certain brands of camera, they seem to be less robust with occasional image breakup (difficult to detect) or sometimes more persistently going offline. Simply switching the camera offline and online in Sighthound brings them back.

Given all the video analytics going on in Sighthound, it would be easy to detect this. My preferred solution would be to define an area of the video stream where constant movement is expected, and if it is not detected within a certain period then Sighthound tries to reconnect and sends an alert. When setting up this feature, it would be a simple case of defining the monitored area to be the on screen display of the date/time in the video stream, that way the amount of data being analysed would be very small, and there would be no risk of a false alarm being generated.

[Semper Vaporo]

I have one IP cam (and 5 USB cams); the IP cam is hardwired to a router, which is then hardwired to the PC. (My Surveillance system does not use WiFi.) Also, the router is NOT connected to the internet so there is no internet connection at all for this system (which stymies my ability to license the newest version of SH).

The IP camera (TrendNET TV-IP400W) tends to disconnect after running for a while. Sometimes SightHound will reconnect automatically after few seconds and sometimes it takes longer than I am willing to sit and wait, so I turn it Off (in SightHound, not the power to the camera) and then turn it back On and it will connect again in a few seconds.

This problem seems to get progressively worse as time goes on. I have tried various things to see what the problem might be.

I have tried cycling power on the camera and that only seems to help for a very short time.

I used to completely uninstall VDV (the predecessor to SH), erase all video files from the surveillance folders and reinstall the program and that would help, but not for long. After SH was installed, that was not any help as the camera has spontaneously disconnect within minutes of restarting everything.

I have recently discovered that it appears to be associated with how long my router has been powered up. In the last week, that camera was disconnecting every few minutes and most of the time automatically reconnecting less than a minute later. But then I had to start turning it Off and back On within SH to get it back sooner. I tried removing power from the camera, leaving it off a while and then turning it back on and that didn't change anything. I then pulled the power plug out of the router for a minute or so and reconnected it. SH connected to the camera and it has not spontaneously disconnected (that I have seen) since then.

This sort of thing is often associated with some sort of "memory leak" someplace... a memory leak is where some portion of memory is allocated, used, and then not entirely returned to the operating system when no longer needed, and thus memory is slowly used up, until things stop working because there is no more memory available to allocate. Sometimes things will continue to operate but will be severely slowed because the memory is fragmented and it takes too much time to allocate a fixed size segment.

I have no idea what could be happening inside a router to cause this problem, but I will be monitoring my IP cam for increasing "Disconnects" and will cycle power on the router to see if it again reduces their frequency.

But it might be something for others to try if they are seeing this random spontaneous disconnect of IP cams. Try rebooting/cycling power on your router. And report here if it seems to help.

[williamjames07]

It will be work as u saying.

[JustStan]

I also wish to +1 this request, for the obvious security reasons stated by others. I would like to be notified via the Sighthound Android app if any of my cameras goes offline (according to SH*) and fails to reconnect within a minute or two.

* I say "according to SH", because there are times when my cameras are still online and can be viewed via the internet, but are offline to SH.

[darold]

I would also like to add a +1 to this. I'm having issues with one of my cameras and don't notice it's disconnected until I go look at it or for some video. It would be nice to know there is an issue before it's too late.

[shadowbit1234]

+1, very critical option.

[nz_cctv]

Running version 2.5.1 b15102
Does too appear to be an option.
+1 , critical in my opinion.