Sighthound Video 7 BETA 1 is released

[visionik]

We are pleased to announce the first BETA release of Sighthound Video 7.0. This release includes a major rewrite of the video pre-processing pipeline of Sighthound VIdeo.

You can download the beta by logging into your Sighthound account.

Read more at:

https://www.sighthound.com/news/sighthound-video-7-beta

[HansS]

Hello, this is exciting news!

Question though: Is it OK to migrate the camdb file and rules folder from the 6.1 version? I have a freshly installed Mac Mini 2018, with the beta on it. After installation I quit Sighthound Video, and restored the camdb and rules folder from a Time Machine backup. All camera's and rules are now there, but I keep getting "Sighthound Video quit unexpectedly" errors.

[Fribur]

Do not want to come of too critical as this announcement is great news, but reading about DXVA and CUDA support for H.264 decoding sounds very much like a topic that was hot ~10 years ago (on FFmpeg, avsforum): I would be thrilled to hear about plans for H.265: numerous webcams sold nowadays come with support for that, and for 4K resolution (mine from DAHUA has that, huge improvement for actually recognizing people) it is sort of essential to keep bitrate manageable.

Could you indicate when you foresee support for H.265?

[visionik]

Hi Fribur -

The vast (over 90%) majority of our customers run out of processing power before they run out of storage capacity or network bandwidth.

Most of our customers want three things: 1. Less CPU use, 2. better computer vision, and 3. an easier to use product (Closer to Nest, Arlo, Ring, etc level of simplicity)

So we have been focusing on those three things.

The changes to the image pre-processing stage of Sighthound Video are extensive and go way beyond DXVA and CUDA (and Video ToolBox) support. On my system, for example, total CPU usage with Sighthound Video 7 is less than half of what it was on version 6.

H.265 goes the other direction - significantly higher CPU use for, to be honest, little value. Again, very few of our customers have storage space or network bandwidth issues.

There is also the challenge of H.265 codec licensing, which is, simply put, a train wreck. You have to get a license from two groups: HEVC Advance and MPEG-LA. Many of our competitors simply ignore this reality and ship an open source H.265 codec without patent licensing. We won't be doing that.

All that said, our use of DXVA, CUDA, and Video Toolbox are a big step in solving both the processing issues and licensing issues around H.265, and it's one of the reasons why we made this change this year. I hope, but can not promise, that it will let us also announce H.265 support this year.

Again, please understand that the vast majority of our customers have no interest in H.265 - especially when they understand it was just going to drive CPU use even higher.

[visionik]

PS: To give you an idea of the "reality" of the Sighthound Video customer base, we have another update ready, right now, which will further reduce cpu use by 20% or more. But we can't ship it, because there is an underlying bug (in code which is not ours) that makes it break on older Intel CPU's.

You would not believe how many of our many users are running Sighthound Video on processors which are 7+ and even 10+ years old.

[visionik]

HansS - so far as moving the DB, that is an issue you should submit to support via a ticket. I'm afraid I can't help with that one

[Fribur]

...You would not believe how many of our many users are running Sighthound Video on processors which are 7+ and even 10+ years old.

Visionik, Thank you very much for the comprehensive and swift response: that will hopefully not only help me to rationalize the current lack of HEVC/H.265 support.

Question is maybe what is hen/egg, as with all innovation: support for modern standards (there are already talks about AV2 and H.266) might swing that customer-base to "only" be 5 years behind the current development.

Admittedly I am not convinced by your CPU load argument for H.265. The heavy lifting of encoding is done by Webcams that consume 8 watt tanks to dedicated hardware in the ARM CPU's. Intel Quicksync (since Skylake 2015) provides 4K H.265 decoding of multiple streams effectively "for free" with close to zero CPU load (dedicate hardware like in all mobile CPU that come with support H.265 such as Snapdragons). Usable via ffmpeg, or Intel Media SDK, played with the latter myself (little console app to batch trans-code old Smartphone videos). Really not much effort to use it. Decoding license comes with the Intel processor as I understand (I am aware of the license mess which prompted the development of AV1). I understand the counter argument that maybe only 30% of your customer based benefit from that, but they would, and Sighthound would stay appealing not only for those that use 7-10 year old hardware (the very reason why companies have flagship products for the few early adopters/enthusiasts).

[warthog9]

My hat goes off, this is a MAJOR step forward in performance. I was running around 80-100% with nary any gpu usage on an i7-6700T. Now I'm back down into the 50% range and the GPU (Intel 530) is chugging along at ~73%. That's, obviously, huge and I'm glad to see that!

Is there any commentary on the relative performance of nvidia based cards? Is a 1080 TI or a Quadro dramatically better than a 1030, or are we talking only modest gains from higher end (and higher wattage) cards?

Also, from the blog post it's mentioned "Users will have new options that no longer require firewall holes to be open for remote access.". I assume this isn't supplanting the local web access, and there will be a way to explicitly turn that off (I.E. I want to rather explicitly opt-out of that data leaving my premises and bouncing through your servers), and assuming I am comfortable having "local" (on network, or over my own vpn) that should still work and be the case right?

Also MQTT publishing would be awesome!

[OCB]

Wow - having been one of the old timers who has been a client since the VitaminD Video days - this Beta looks it could be “the” major release I’ve been dreaming of

Agree with a lot of the comments above, especially about having the option to leave recordings local.

Sighthound has always been one of those products whose core technology (and friendly staff!) blew me away, but so many features felt under-developed or abandoned.

Will be trying this Beta ASAP!

[visionik]

Fribur - We will likely have H.265 one day, that's all I can say; and again, the work to support things like DXVA let's use use things like the Intel processor license.