Feedback from a new "pro" customer

[Critters]

Hey
After growing my Dropcam collection to 5 and getting fed-up with video dropout and monthly fees as well as abysmal customer support I decided to build my own solution and settled on Sighthound. I installed it on my old desktop computer (i5 3.3Ghz, 8GB ram, Win 7) and picked up 4 Hikvision 3MP cameras (DS-2CD2032F-I) and a PoE switch.

Setup was quite easy, creating rules to ignore areas, copy files to a Dropbox folder, execute a script to remove old files from that Dropbox folder and remote access was all a breeze.

Here's my (hopefully) constructive criticism, in order of personal annoyance

1. When the cameras switch from day to night and back again SightHound records this as motion, it would be good if it was smart enough to ignore this. If the ENTIRE screen changes, chances are it's not valid motion.
2. Though the cameras can send a nice 1080@30fps signal, video is stored at around 11fps, apparently this is because the motion detection process works best at that speed but I don't see why that should prevent the software from saving the source stream while sampling every 3rd frame for the motion detection.
3. The quality of the stored video seems lower than the video coming from the camera when viewed through the camera software, I suspect it's re-encoding it, shame
4. The iOS app is great but after viewing a small number of videos the video playback becomes unstable and then completely fails, the app has to be restarted to work.
5. CPU usage seems excessive for 4 cameras (which I changed to record at 10fps), they have 1 rule each and the CPU usage is pegged at 70%, not leaving much room for growth.
6. Video viewed using the remote feature in the browser is much lower quality, OK for finding motion but you then have to track down the source video file. It would be SUPER great if, when viewing a clip remotely, you had the option to download the source. In the iOS app it would be nice to save the source to your camera roll too.
7. It would be nice to be able to setup a "camera offline" alert, just in case something breaks and I don't find out when I go to check the video days later.

Keep up the good work, looking forward to future updates.

[ryan]

Hi Critters,

Thanks for the great feedback. The items on your list are pain points for us as well and things we'd like to improve in the future. Though very little of note to most people the main change in 2.5 was a rewrite and substantial work on our video libraries, and this will continue in the future touching on several of your bullets. The day/night switch - some people do have cameras in a place where someone entering a scene can change the entire frame at once so ignoring this isn't an option. However, these certainly shouldn't be detected as people if you're using a person only rule especially once our latest algorithms make their way into the app. You can go ahead and try to fool the person detector at https://www.sighthound.com/products/cloud if you'd like.

We don't know of any issues as you describe with the iOS app becoming unusable. Are you using the latest 1.1 version? What device and iOS version are you running? Let us know and we'll try to reproduce whatever you might be encountering.

Best,
- ryan