Feature request: more granular triggers / events

benish

I'm just getting started with security cameras and I'm integrating them with other devices via Home Assistant. I'd love more granular ways to create triggers for events. Some examples of things I'd like to do:

• Record all motion, but only trigger events in Home Assistant if a human is detected in a certain area. I think I can do this by adding the same camera twice, as explained here, but it seems weird to have an extra Camera entity in SecuritySpy for this?
• Trigger an event if a person enters a certain area / crosses a particular line in the frame, and a different event if they enter a different area. For example, if someone enters the first couple feet of my driveway/yard: increase the brightness of the nearest lights to 75%. Maybe this is just someone picking up some of their dog's poop and I don't want to discourage that. If they move past that, increase brightness to 100%, play a sound, send me a notification, turn on a light in the house, etc.

I do have newer Hikvision cameras that have line crossing, region intrusion, etc. smart events and it sounds like I might be able to use that to accomplish some of this… and I just realized that in conjunction with the trick of adding the same camera multiple times that will perhaps do everything I want to do? But if I duplicate all my cameras 2 or 3 times in SecuritySpy is that going to bog everything down and destroy my performance? I have 5 (soon to be 6) cameras running on an older MacPro (the trash can model), which is working fine right now but probably can't handle 3× the load.

In any case, it'd be really nice to be able to manage all this within SecuritySpy! I hate the Hikvision software and loathe trying to use it.

Ben

Thanks for the feedback. SecuritySpy was not designed with this level of granularity in mind - you can have different triggers for recording vs. actions to some extent, but not to the extent you are describing, and there is no option to have multiple actions, each with different triggers. This is why the workaround to achieve this of adding the camera twice is a bit clunky, although it does mostly work fine for the minority of users who want to achieve granularity beyond what SecuritySpy was designed for. On many Macs, the extra load of doing this is not noticeable, but on your Mac Pro it will be noticeable because this machine has no hardware-accelerating video decoding abilities.

We are considering redesigning this to allow more flexibility in SecuritySpy v6 but we haven't decided yet, so the current system will not change in the near future.

benish

Thanks for the insights! I totally understand that this is beyond the current scope of what SecuritySpy was designed for, and that this is not a simple thing to add. I think SecuritySpy is still a great choice for my NVR – this added granularity would just make it even better.

It's also good to know that duplicating all these cameras isn't a great idea on this machine. I appreciate the guidance there.

In case anyone else comes across this and is working on a similar setup: it looks like I might be able to configure Home Assistant to directly parse the event stream from the Hikvision cameras:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/hikvision/

But that will require me to fight with the Hikvision software to get the events configured. 😭

jimmyjohnson

I’ve been thinking of duplicating each camera for vehicle alert and person alert.

Then, will build a dummy switch in homebridge for each permutation.

Then, build an alert using PushCut and tie into SS as an automation for each switch.

Is there a better way? Basically, I want to know anytime a car comes down the driveway, but only be notified if a person is coming down driveway after dark (kids go up and down driveway all day). Etc…..

Ben

You don't need Homebridge/PushCut for this - you can use SecuritySpy's own iOS notifications. Once you add the camera twice to SecuritySpy, you set Actions mode of the first instance to the "Armed 24/7" schedule, and you set Actions mode for the second instance to a schedule that will arm it only at night (e.g. the built-in "Sunset To Sunrise" schedule, or one that you create manually with fixed times). Set the first instance to detect vehicles only and the second to detect humans only via the Trigger controls. Then turn on notifications for each in our SecuritySpy iOS app on your iOS device.

jimmyjohnson

I've found SS reliable for these notifications, but the thumbnail/preview doesn't always work when outside of LAN. I believe this is related to specifics of my network/firewall and ISP uses CG-NAT which fouls VPN and other connections. But dropping a follow up comment to thank @Ben for the feedback which worked well.