UI suggestions and other tidbits

[B00ze]

Good day.

So here's my suggestion list. Most are slight changes to UI components.
Near the bottom are "Me Too" suggestions for bigger changes.

First, as a user with a very specific taste for date and time formats, I would suggest these tweaks:

• Display the date, in the review pane, in the date-format selected in the OS (e.g. yyyy-mm-dd for me).
• Display time (everywhere, including scheduler and playback window) in selected OS format (e.g. 24Hrs for me).
• Display time markers, below the clip timeline in review pane, in selected OS format (e.g. from 00 to 24).
• In the review/playback pane, display remaining clip time or clip length to the right of the progress bar in fixed HH:MM:SS format, e.g. 16 seconds would show 00:00:16; it always takes me a few ticks to evaluate/remember that, for example, 3:16 means 3 minutes and 16 seconds.

Make the Calendar more useful:

• When opening the calendar in the review pane, dates where there is any recorded video are currently displayed in bold. I would prefer bolded dates to be the ones where there are hits relating to the currently selected rule. If I'm looking for person-entering-door, it is not useful to know that I have 2 weeks worth of video; I want to see which of those dates have someone entering the door.

Other UI tweaks:

• Remember the playback speed selected the last time used (currently always goes back to 1x).
• Remember the selected "Look For" filter (for each camera) the last time used (currently always goes back to "All Objects").
• Remember the "Video" frontEnd's window size (and possibly last position on the screen as well).
• Ability to duplicate rules on the "main" camera screen from rule drop-down menu (currently only available from the review pane).
• Allow "ignore objects smaller than" to be more than 70 pixels (suggest 120 pixels, 1/2 detection frame) and rename to "detect only objects taller than".
• Get rid of the "and show how big this is on the image above" and just show it; what use is it to save this along with the rule?
• Allow making neatly square regions (e.g. hold Shift to resize both x/y at the same time if region only has 4 handles).
• In the "Look For" listview, only show rules applicable to the selected camera (it's possible this is already how VD behaves).

A little UI sorting bug:

• Rules sorting by name is different in Main/Review screen. In the main Camera view, this is the order of 2 of my rules: (1) People in lg300, (2) People in lg300 Weekend. However, in the review pane's "Look For" listview, this is the order: (1) People in lg300 Weekend, (2) People in lg300.

Some miscellaneous suggestions:

• Option to disable automatic checking of new versions.
• Ability to specify maximum log size (seems to grow infinitely; camera and DiskCleaner grow quickly).
• Make VD clean-up the "tmp??????sessions" log folders created by the "analytics" lib, these become numerous very quickly.
• Provide a way to relocate the "backEnd" from within VD and save this setting in VD's folder; specifying a specific path affects all users; hit the "default" button to get per-user again (i.e. %userprofile%\bla\bla\bla under windoze). This allows sharing database between users on the same machine.
• Deleting video should make it "temporary" video again. Currently, if I "quick-delete" saved video, it remains behind but cannot be located via rules. This behaviour had me wondering why I had a bold date 2 weeks back on the calendar, but no video to show for it. I think deleted video should become "temporary" again and be deleted when it is too old (just like other "temporary" video).

Show video resolution received by camera (when editing cams):

• VD does a "camera test" whenever you edit (or at least add) a camera. It should definitively show the resolution it was able to obtain from said camera. It's good that VD's resolution setting is called "SCALE video" because that's what it does, I guess, but it's important to know the resolution the camera is sending back (so for instance we can avoid uselessly scaling-up low-res incoming video).

And finally, the "Me Too" suggestions:

• Run as a Service.
• Add a Web Server.
• Date/Timestamps on video (perhaps sync your own time off a selectable ntp server for added robustness in court?).
• Support recording sound (I personally don't need sound "detection" but would appreciate sound to go with video).
• Limit number of emails sent on event triggers (seems like a good idea even tho I've not been flooded yet).

Alright, enough with the shopping list.
If you've read this far, thanks!
Best Regards,

[ryan]

Hi b00ze,

Thanks for the suggestions! I did want to let you know that the log files do have a maximum size (offhand I think it's ~5mb each) and will not grow indefinitely.

[markjans]

Great program.
Would love to see the above suggestions especially the ability to limit the number of emails sent.
It would be great to have face recognition, but this is a big ask.
My camera is a widescreen 16:9. The picture is squeezed into vitamin d's frame which makes people taller and skinny.
Cheers
Mark