Sighthound Video 7 BETA 1 is released

[flynreelow]

Just got a response that this beta 7 does not work with Mac High Sierra.

[Neurobit]

For all practical purposes, it does not work with Big Sur either...
Hopefully beta 2 will resolve all the issues a lot of us are having.

[cwizard]

I am unable to launch Sighthound Video v7 beta (current). v6 uninstalls and re-installs fine and works properly. Environment is a Xeon Server E3-1200 series CPU, 16GB of memory. Runs the current software great.

v7 Installs, but will not launch and I cannot connect to it otherwise.

[Neurobit]

Your experience with your Xeon server is similar to the behavior on MacOS.

Hopefully someone from SH engineering will post and clarify status of betas and fixes, but not holding my breath.
It’s rather perplexing to not get status info or any feedback for weeks at a time on their own board. Only crickets.

[BeanBagKing]

Looks like a 7.0.5Beta was released today. As with previous beta versions, no release notes that I've seen. Ran the install, no visible or performance difference yet on Server 2019.

[Neurobit]

Thanks for the update!

[ranger6]

updated 7.0.4B to 7.0.5B, no changes noted, still detecting rain drops as people...

No change log or release notes, so no clue what to look for either.

I am going to try a few more versions, and if things don't get any better, going to find something else to use. It feels like Sighthound is a company that can't get it together.

Going to repeat this on the off chance someone from SH reads this forum... DO NOT RELEASE CODE WITHOUT SOME RELEASE NOTES, it looks unprofessional, small and garage startup like. You want us to help test the beta, but don't give us a freaking clue what you are changing.

[somefrom123]

I have updated from 7.0.4 to 7.0.5.

Mobile issue - Things seem to be working a little better with remote access, but I am still having trouble getting the camera video on my iPhone (IOS v13.7) using the web page access via Safari. The thumbnail views work, but the live full camera stays blocky and doesn't have the full screen controls on the top and bottom.

Update - the iPhone web view seems to be working at the moment, perhaps some safari cached content got updated? Might need to change something to make sure old content in a browser's cache gets invalidated.

Cosmetic issue - The banner at the top of the Camera Edit dialog is blank white.

BTW, I am running with disableOnvif and disableUpnp to decrease the network overhead since I don't need the auto-configuration features. I wish I could set these in preferences rather than having to create these flag files.

[BeanBagKing]

A new blog was posted: https://www.sighthound.com/news/sightho ... on-big-sur
Along with release notes: https://support.sighthound.com/kb/artic ... ase-notes/

I'm not sure if this means someone at Sighthound is actually watching these forums and saw the calls for release notes, or if it's just chance. Both the blog and the notes are light on details, and don't mention anything about the previous beta releases or updated timelines. In fact, the release notes are for a previous beta version (7.0.4 released in Dec, not 7.0.5 released 8 Jan).

If someone is watching these forums, seriously, community engagement! People consider this product to be a part time side-project at best, and it feels like it's dead. This echos my sentiments from 8ish months ago, it's not something new. You have customers that are active on your own website discussing moving to another platform because the product looks dead and you don't do anything about it? Why would you expect anyone to pay for v7 if this is the level of effort you put forward? It's a problem you are aware of because I actually received a reply from the CEO, this isn't anything new.

Edit: If anyone wants to complain about the current level of community engagement, the CEO's email was posted in an old blog post, it is ceo@sighthound.com, and of course there is support@sighthound.com. I've reached out to the CEO in the past with precisely these concerns and nothing was done. Perhaps if people people were to do so though, someone might realize this is an actual problem.

Edit 2: I received the following reply from support when I brought the "dead" feeling of the product (much of which stems from these forums) to their attention. This is more or less what I heard last time, so while I would love to give them the benefit of the doubt (and the reply was prompt), I think I will wait to see what changes actually take place.

Sighthound is losing customers because the product appears to be dead. See the following thread: <link trimmed> This is something I spoke up about 8 months ago, it is not a new issue: <link trimmed>

I also took the time to reach out to the CEO ([snip]) regarding the forums on May 20, 2020. At the time I said that the product appears dead for a number of reasons, not just the forums. He said that Sighthound was considering shuttering the forums. I think this would be a mistake as anyone that currently monitors those would only take that as further confirmation that the product line was no longer being supported.

There are spam posts that have now been up for 4 days: <link trimmed> Do you have a marketing department? Someone that runs community engagement? Does you company not care at all about the impression this makes on people looking to purchase your software? About those looking to upgrade? Why am I, a customer, more concerned about this that your company? I like Sighthound, I want it to succeed, but it cannot and will not with the current level of effort put into addressing customer concerns.

--------------------------------------

Firstly, thank you for bringing your concerns and issues to our attention. We understand how lack of activity in the forums makes the development of Sighthound Viode appear dead. Currently, we are working on Sighthound Video 7 and getting those bugs and issues squared away.

I can try addressing some of your concerns here.

The development of Sighthound Video is not dead in any form, and our engineers are working on providing performance improvements to the application. We want to take advantage of better processing, so the resource requirements from Sighthonud aren't as intensive as in years past. These performance improvements take some time and testing on our end, but we hope users can take advantage of performance improvements.

As for your second point about the forum discussions, we have not made any conclusive decision on this matter, but I also understand that we have not been responsive. We will be monitoring the forums weekly and try to respond to any inquiries that come into the forums. The forums aren't our primary form of communication with our users as we receive most of our inquiries through email and our ticketing system. Through our ticketing system, we reply as soon as we can. We have also been considering another approach to our forums, but we have not decided whether we would transition to this new platform or keep the forums and the new solution.

Regarding the spam posts, I will bring this to our team's attention so that we can prevent these bots from posting or at least that staff members from Sighthound can block these users from posting.

We do want to continue placing Sighthound users as our priority. Its users such as yourself who make Sighthound better. I want to apologize for the inconsistency that users may feel we have provided to them.

Please let us know how we can further improve or if you have any further questions.

Best,

[BeanBagKing]

7.0.6Beta released today (1/28). No patch notes on https://support.sighthound.com/kb/artic ... ase-notes/ as of this time