Some Pre-Purchase Questions
Hello! I want to start off by saying this seems like a great little community and it has already taught me a few things about SecuritySpy. I've been running the trial for about 3 weeks now and have had a mostly good experience with it. I've been a Blue Iris user for 5+ years now but I'm looking for a change. Partly because the development over there is pretty stagnant (their big .0 version mostly just changed the colors of everything) and their mobile app is awful. But, more importantly, I have an M4 Mac Mini that sits idle on my desk much of the time so I'd like to put it to good use and decommission the Windows machine that literally only exists for BI. Enough about me, though. Let me ask what I came here to ask. Apologies if it's a bit long-winded.
First question is about actions/notifications. I like to receive motion alerts on my iPhone (a la cloud-connected cameras). I had this pretty well-dialed in with Blue Iris and duplicate or excessive alerts were mostly avoided. I can't seem to replicate this with SecuritySpy. I've tried tweaking the settings but I still get (what I consider to be) WAY too many alerts. I have two cameras facing the street in front of my house. If someone walks their dog along the sidewalk, I usually get at least four notifications - one for a human, one for an animal then repeated on the other camera a second later. Sometimes it gets even worse and it detects a parked car or then does "Human and animal detected." So the question is - what can I tweak to minimize some of this? Bonus ask - can a feature be implemented to have actions cancelled on Camera 2 if Camera 1 already fired within the last XX seconds? I've attached a screenshot below to show what I mean.
Second question is about the AI detection, but is not really a crucial one for my use case. I notice that sometimes if there's motion in the frame AND a parked car, it fires a vehicle trigger. Is the AI not "smart" enough to know that the car isn't the thing that was moving? (Forgive my ignorance on how these algorithms/models really operate. This is more an educational ask than a request for a fix).
Third question is in regard to the iOS app. If I tap on a motion notification, it takes me to the live view of that camera. Is this the expected behavior? I would think it would take you to the recording of the event it's notifying about.
Fourth, also about the iOS app. One of the few things the BI app got right was a nifty feature where tapping the left or right side of the image would scrub back 5 seconds backwards or forwards, respectively. This was WAY more intuitive than trying to finger scrub through a long clip on a small screen. While it doesn't have to be exactly the same, I think we could benefit from some more playback controls in the app. EDIT: I just noticed that if you rotate the phone to landscape view they are there, but maybe they can be squeezed in somewhere in the portrait view too?
Lastly, and this is definitely a question for Ben, is there a way to extend the trial a little bit past 30 days? I'm 90% committed to purchasing a 12 or 16 camera license, but need a little more time once I get the above questions answered. Plus we haven't entered the "Wife Testing" phase just yet. 😉
I want to end by saying that I really like this software. Even just in the last three weeks it has brought a lot of quality of life improvements, particularly how the notifications automatically crop into where the motion was detected - LOVE that! So I hope my questions above did not come across any other way. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out!
Comments
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Great to hear you've had a good experience with SecuritySpy so far!
The notifications frequency can be reduced by increasing the "Reset time" value that you'll find under Settings Cameras > Actions > Advanced Actions Options. This defines the minimum time before the same trigger can cause Actions (and therefore notifications) to run again. However, note the following:
- Currently, this limits applies to the same trigger happening again, e.g. if a human is detected, no other human detection will generate a notification for this period). However, if a human is detected and then a dog is detected separately, this will indeed cause two notifications. Perhaps we can add a setting to control this behaviour, allowing you to choose for this to instead apply to all triggers instead of the same trigger. We'll see if can add this in the next update.
- If there is a stationary vehicle in the frame, and you have enabled vehicle detection, then this stationary vehicle can cause triggers when there is some non-interesting motion happening around the vehicle - this is a known limitation. Either fully mask out stationary vehicles, or turn vehicle detection off.
There is currently no function to cancel Actions on one camera after they are triggered on another camera, sorry. To reduce your notifications, I would suggest in this case that you have notifications turned on for either your Front Yard camera or your Driveway camera, but not both.
Yes, when you tap a notification, it takes you to the live view of a camera, this is expected behaviour. From there, the camera's recordings are just one tap away via the folder icon top-right of the live view.
As you discovered, the skip back/forward controls on playback are present if there's enough screen area, so flipping the phone to landscape will give you a better playback experience. Also, while scrubbing, move your finger up just above the scrub bar, and you enter fine-scrub mode where movements left/right scrub through the movie at a much slower speed.
In terms of the trial period, there isn't an easy way to reset this without losing some settings, but if you email us, we will send instructions on how to best do this. Alternatively, all new purchases come with a 30-day refund period, so you could treat this as an extended trial.
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Thanks for the reply, Ben! I'll send you an e-mail about the trial reset.
All your responses are fair enough and I think I can work with them. I appreciate you looking into adding a setting to control repeat triggers more granularly. While I would love to see one camera cancel actions on another added in the future, I respect the fact that I have no idea how difficult that would be from a coding perspective. So I will take your advice and either disable notifications on one of them or fine tune the motion areas so that they don't overlap.
Definitely appreciate the tip about the fine scrubbing on playback. I knew that was an iOS native function and probably should've remembered to try it in SS. Thanks for that.
