Viewing recordings on iPhone app

thewinelake

One of the great features of SS is the ability to watch recordings remotely. It's a lot better than the Swann DVR software I was previously using, but it's still problematic for me in terms of finding the interesting bit of the clips.

It would be great if one could have a view like you get on a video editing package - the strips of negatives view of a bunch of stills, maybe one every 20s so that one can locate an area of interest (eg. the postman walking up the drive). Or a fast scrub forward/back with a display of the time - when SS sends me a camera capture, that has the time, so I could just put the time in.

The current system also seems a touch flakey to me - I'm not quite sure what's going on, but if I tap on a clip and scroll forward and press play, it doesn't seem to work consistently. Maybe it needs to download all of the clip up to that point, but it's hard to see what's going on - YouTube is the point of reference here?

Ben

Are you capturing continuous-capture movies or motion-capture movies? I would recommend the latter, with one movie per event (rather one movie per day), in order to most easily view the evens via your iPhone. When you capture like this, the thumbnail in the list of captured files provides a preview of the event.

I do like your ideas regarding the playback (strip of negatives display), however this would be very difficult to implement for movies that are progressively downloaded and displayed over a network, as is the case here.

When you jump forwards during playback, it should respond quickly - the whole file up to the new point does not need to be downloaded - but the responsiveness of this of course depends on the speed of your network connection. You may need to wait a few seconds for playback to resume at the new location. I'm not aware of any problems related to this, but please let me know if you are finding this to be unreliable and we will look into it (just make sure you are using the latest version of SecuritySpy and the iOS app, to preclude any bugs we've already fixed).

thewinelake

Continuous. I don't trust motion capture derived from a camera*. But the chunks of video are only about 15 mins each.
*The way I do motion capture is to have a PIR linked via open z-wave to Home Assistant which then sends an AppleScript message to SS to send me an email.

thewinelake

Although, thinking about it, my gripe is one of excessive false positives, so maybe it's a good idea to engage motion detection...

Ben

Are you getting excessive false positives from the PIR sensor?

Have you tried SecuritySpy's motion detection? You might find that this works well for you.

thewinelake

No, I get excessive false positives from camera-based motion detection.
I will, though, give that a go to get more manageable recordings.

Ben

Yes you could try that. Or, if the PIR sensor is proving accurate (they normally are), you can use this to trigger SecuritySpy to record, in the same way you are currently using it to trigger SecuritySpy to send emails.

stclairtr

I would like to be able to pick a particular date/time without having to scroll through all the continuous thumbnails (10-minute segments). Am I missing an easier way to do this?

Ben

Hi @stclairtr - do you mean via the iOS app? This is not currently possible - you can filter by file type, but not currently by date; the files are simply listed chronologically, and as you scroll down the list you are going back in time.

stclairtr

Yes, in the iOS app. Picking a date without scrolling would be nice.