for me, the new version is not useful. Unfortunately, the email notification when Motion Detect works no longer. In addition, PTZ does not work properly; pan the camera does not stop but continues to face the front.
@Michael - the email notification issue is a bug, which is fixed in a new version of SecuritySpy released today. Sorry about that. As for the PTZ problem, if you are still seeing it with this version, please email us with information about what make/model of camera you have, and a more detailed description of the problem you are seeing.
I kinda liked the no-emails bug. Made things nice and peaceful - no more endless warnings about packets being dropped due to network congestion or CPU saturation!
:-)
Like everyone, looking forward to the beta. I presume it's going to be named version 3.5?
Hello all and thanks for your patience. The beta will be ready for testing early next week. Many thanks for all of you who have offered to test it, we had many more users offering than we actually need, so if you didn't get an email from me directly about this I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the final release, sorry!
Will the 4.0 release be an available upgrade for all paid licenses? I just pulled the trigger on an 8 camera license and hoping I won't have additional license costs when the next version is released.
Hi @eribble - as standard we offer a 6-month free upgrade period after purchase, so if you've recently made a purchase then you'll get the free upgrade to version 4.
Ben, what are the upgrade charges going to be for those who have had their licenses beyond the 6 month grace period? I need to decide if its time to move to a stand alone NVR or will I be upgrading to version 4.
Hi @doodah, beyond the 6 month grace period, the upgrade charge to go from version 3 to version 4 will be half the full license cost (i.e. a 50% discount off purchasing version 4 at full price). Version 4 will be a major new version with lots of improvements a new features, and will be worth the fee. In the 12 years that SecuritySpy has been on the market we have been improving it continuously and have so far only charged twice for major upgrades, so I hope you will all consider this very reasonable.
Ben, when you say 50% is the pricing remaining the same for version 4 as it is now for version 3?
It's really not an unreasonable upgrade charge for a major release. I hope that there are performance improvements as many times new features start dragging down older hardware.
I'm running 8 camera license on a 2012 Quad Core Mac mini that also serves as iTunes server for my home. I am happy performance wise now. My concern is the future.. especially since Apple stopped selling us newer mini's with a quad core processor.
Being retired I am more sensitive to upgrade pricing and hardware performance for the dollar. I should have jumped in on the beta testing but have been under the weather and knew I couldn't do you any justice right now testing wise. As a software engineer I take beta testing seriously and not just an opportunity to get hands on new software ahead of the others. You can't test quality into a product, but you sure can test some bugs out. :-) I've always found your product to be of fine quality. I am looking forward to seeing the release notes for version 4. I'm curious as to all the new things you have in store for your customers.
Hi @doodah, yes the pricing structure will be remaining the same.
As for performance, this is something we've really been focussing on in the update. There will be many performance improvements throughout the software, especially if you are running OS X 10.8 or later and/or are using a Mac newer than 2011 when Apple started adding H.264 hardware acceleration to some Mac models.
It's a real shame that the newer Mac minis are all dual-core and therefore slower than the previous quad-core lineups. I'm really hoping that the next batch will feature quad-core processors, as these are ideal machines for running SecuritySpy. If you have a 2012 quad-core one, that's one of the best and you'll get many more years of good use out of it yet.
Sorry to hear you've been under the weather, hope all is well and that you will recover soon!
So I upgraded from a 16 camera license to a 32 camera license in March. Assuming this new version comes out before September, what would this cost me to upgrade?
Hi @doodah we're working hard and are hoping for 1-2 months but it's difficult to say. It's not possible to purchase the upgrade yet; while it's almost ready, we wouldn't feel right about selling unfinished software.
Some of my installations are experiencing problems with the email reporting. I have installations that are required by State law to inform the facility manager of trouble with the camera system. The problem is that there are a lot of error emails that are of no real consequence. Like intermittent dropped frames and broken E-pipe errors that turn out not to be a real problem. Could you add granular error reporting? I would like to receive an email only if the system can't find it's hard drives or a camera will not connect after 10 minutes of trying. The latter would prevent an error every Tuesday morning at 2am when Dahua cameras restart. How about a "heartbeat" email to signal that all is well? The heartbeat email would go only to me and the critical failure emails would need to go to me and the facility manager. Also, it would be nice to have a blackout schedule so that errors that happen overnight would wait to send until morning. Thanks Ben, for all your good work!
P.S. Everything else being the same, I have way more of these errors on my installs that use Netgear switches.
Hi @General_Custer - yes, in certain circumstances where RAM is the limiting factor (e.g. when using long pre-capture times which uses lots of RAM). More important is probably going to be hardware-accelerated video compression/decompression, and the multitude of other performance enhancements that will be included in version 4. Most systems would be CPU-limited rather than RAM-limited.
Comments
Now that 3.4.9 has been released, I'm sure Ben will be able to turn his attention to the beta.
my first Feedback:
for me, the new version is not useful. Unfortunately, the email notification when Motion Detect works no longer.
In addition, PTZ does not work properly; pan the camera does not stop but continues to face the front.
So I'm back to version 3.4.8.
Best wishes
Michael
:-)
Like everyone, looking forward to the beta. I presume it's going to be named version 3.5?
Need an alpha tester? :-)
oh, and log rolling?
april first 2016.
It's really not an unreasonable upgrade charge for a major release. I hope that there are performance improvements as many times new features start dragging down older hardware.
I'm running 8 camera license on a 2012 Quad Core Mac mini that also serves as iTunes server for my home. I am happy performance wise now. My concern is the future.. especially since Apple stopped selling us newer mini's with a quad core processor.
Being retired I am more sensitive to upgrade pricing and hardware performance for the dollar. I should have jumped in on the beta testing but have been under the weather and knew I couldn't do you any justice right now testing wise. As a software engineer I take beta testing seriously and not just an opportunity to get hands on new software ahead of the others. You can't test quality into a product, but you sure can test some bugs out. :-) I've always found your product to be of fine quality. I am looking forward to seeing the release notes for version 4. I'm curious as to all the new things you have in store for your customers.
As for performance, this is something we've really been focussing on in the update. There will be many performance improvements throughout the software, especially if you are running OS X 10.8 or later and/or are using a Mac newer than 2011 when Apple started adding H.264 hardware acceleration to some Mac models.
It's a real shame that the newer Mac minis are all dual-core and therefore slower than the previous quad-core lineups. I'm really hoping that the next batch will feature quad-core processors, as these are ideal machines for running SecuritySpy. If you have a 2012 quad-core one, that's one of the best and you'll get many more years of good use out of it yet.
Sorry to hear you've been under the weather, hope all is well and that you will recover soon!
I have installations that are required by State law to inform the facility manager of trouble with the camera system. The problem is that there are a lot of error emails that are of no real consequence. Like intermittent dropped frames and broken E-pipe errors that turn out not to be a real problem. Could you add granular error reporting? I would like to receive an email only if the system can't find it's hard drives or a camera will not connect after 10 minutes of trying. The latter would prevent an error every Tuesday morning at 2am when Dahua cameras restart.
How about a "heartbeat" email to signal that all is well? The heartbeat email would go only to me and the critical failure emails would need to go to me and the facility manager. Also, it would be nice to have a blackout schedule so that errors that happen overnight would wait to send until morning.
Thanks Ben, for all your good work!
P.S. Everything else being the same, I have way more of these errors on my installs that use Netgear switches.