Overlay from PC

[Marius]

Hi,

A friend of mine recommended I have a look at your software, and I am most impressed so far.

One thing that would be fantastic in the software is the ability to overlay text on the video. I would specifically require this feature as this would allow me to offer a solution to my Retail Clients to monitor there Point of Sale Environment at a price point not available in the market currently. ($199 for your software + IP Cams + installation and setup)

I would foresee that this is accomplised using a similar methodolgy as follows:
1. Setup your WebCam or IP Cam to monitor a certain checkout/till point.
2. Create some form of database that would link this particular camera to a known check out. (Firebird {www.firebirdsql.org} is an excellent Open Source Industrial Strength Database Management System)
3. Whenever there is movement detected record the video, and whenever there is data written to the specific check out, record even if there is no movement. Take the data that is written into the database (using some common fields) and superimpose it on the video.

I do not see that this is currently possible, but what are the chances that something like this can be done?

Regards
Marius

[ryan]

Hi Marius,

I think that what you are ideally asking for would require a lot of exposure of Vitamin D's internals to an external application. For example, there is no concept right now of telling vitamin d to pretend a clip triggered an event when it did not.

In the event that we would add an API for interaction, I imagine what you are trying to do would be structured as follows -
1. You have an application that is monitoring your sales and writing those to a database
2. When it notices a transaction you ask vitamin d for a video clip of the last X seconds
3. You do whatever you want with this clip.

If you really wanted to right now something like this could probably be accomplished. Though we don't have 2. in place, all video is always recorded for at least a day (the cache), filenames have the event time in them (ms since epoch) and if you really really want, all information is logged on the system in sql databases, though we won't provide support for poking around in these.

Adding automatic text overlays (camera name, time) is something we'd like to do, and an API for external apps is on the wish list as well. I don't think that retroactively adding overlays to video would be part of this however, it would likely be more as I've described above where we provide lists of events and chop up video clips and then the external app can do with them as they please.

Not sure if that answers your question or not, but hope it helps some. Feel free to ask more questions or to send a private message if information about your custom app is sensitive.

- ryan