No updates, no support

[emhvoy]

Hi all,

is Sighthound dead? Last update was released months ago and no iOS update since last year.
More and more questions in the forum without any response from Sighthound.

[ratatine]

I have similar suspicions. They seem to be looking at more lucrative services and cloud offerings and perhaps one day some of that will make its way into sighthound but I'm sure by then my support will have expired. Overall I'm pretty dissatisfied. The detection features are poor, frequently labeling grass blowing in the wind as people and don't get me started on bugs. #bugsarepeopletoo

I should make a youtube video showing its performance. Just shoddy. I can write an h264 stream to disk easily with free software and I can get mediocre motion detection from a number of OSS projects. Very disappointed.

[tcesario]

Overall I'm pretty dissatisfied. The detection features are poor, frequently labeling grass blowing in the wind as people and don't get me started on bugs.

I'm frustrated too with the apparent lack of SH support and development, but don't agree that the SH detection features are poor. While I do get some false "people" alerts from dogs, moths, spiders and especially spider webs, SH does a good job at screening out shadows, leaves, etc at least using the rules I've set up. SH is 100 times better than my old Lorex NVR's simple motion detection. Now that was really AWFUL and completely unusable. Have you played around with the 'visible for some period' contraints in the rules? Also, I love the fact that I can process old video with new rules if I want.

Here is to hoping that they are still developing. If not, I think the trend is for newer cameras to have in built people detection (and even face detection), although those are all cloud based which isn't ideal for bandwidth reasons. There will be options I'm sure.

-Tony

[mosheldon]

I can deal with quarterly or bi-annual releases as long as the support is there when I need it. Kevin has stated there is a new build coming by the end of the year, hopefully that will provide some impactful changes and features. I agree that the public visibility for development just isn't there like it used to be. I would say if nothing useful comes in the next 8 months when my renewal isdue then I'll likely walk away from the product.

[visionik]

Hi -

We're not doing less with Sighthound Video, in fact the delay in updates is because we're working on a major upgrade that is unfortunately taking us longer than we'd hoped.

We are adding integration with our modern Computer Vision platform (Sighthound IO, or SIO) to Sighthound Video. SIO is the foundation of all our newer technologies, including vehicle and face detection and recognition. We've spent millions of dollars and many years building SIO, and soon those investments will come to Sighthound Video.

The challenge is that the SIO platform has historically been focused on Linux customers; Where Sighthound Video runs on Windows and OS X.

Getting SIO running 100% on Windows and OS X (and integrated with Sighthound Video) has taken longer than we anticipated.

(Yes, we also want Sighthound Video on Linux - this work will make that easier to deliver, too.)

Separately, I apologize for the lack of responses here. We have decided to focus on support via email, Facebook, and another channel that we will announce shortly. We plan to close the forum here in the coming weeks. I know some of you won't like that - I myself love forum based support, but times are changing and we have found that most of our customers prefer support via other methods.

Sincerely,

-Jonathan Taylor
-Chairman, Sighthound

[foustep]

Yes +1 to Sighthound Video for Linux. Able to make it headless saving resources is great. Also I am looking forward to the new features. Hopefully it does not change the requirements to run Sighthound Video.

As stated, new information is always welcome (or some kind of roadmap). The product itself up until now is running great. Another wish to add on the list is security upgrades (SSL/TLS and increasing security options nowadays is a must), Sighthound Video does support SSL, but to know that leaks have been closed is nice to know.

[warthog9]

The only concern I've got about killing off the forums is there's usually good historical, and searchable, information about it (so you might not always need to answer the same question, and there's historical context for things).

That being said, I'm *VERY* glad to hear about the unifying of your platforms, and I can only imagine what a mess that's been - so kudos to you all, and I know I will be looking forward to seeing the update (everything in my setup has been chugging along like clockwork, so I've no complaints with what I've got - just nice to see progress).

I'll also reiterate how happy I am to hear there might, maybe, possibly be a Linux version too (I might be just a little biased though...).

[Kbond]

Hello @warthog9,

We are still planning on killing the forums, however, we will be archiving them making them searchable for content. So all of the information that has been relayed over the years will still be around.

Please feel free to contact support at support@sighthound.com if you have any other questions or concerns, thank you!

Regards,
-Kevin

[mosheldon]

Kevin,

How's the big update coming along. Is it going to be available before the end of the year?

[Kbond]

Hello,

We still do not have a release date to Sighthound Version 6.0 as of yet and since we are so close to the end of the year, it looks like it might be a January release for the beta. There are a lot of changes coming to the backend so we just want to make sure everything is working properly. You should receive an email from me giving you details on how to install the beta when it is available. Please don't hesitate to email support at support@sighthound.com for any other questions or concerns about this, thank you!

Regards,
-Kevin