Feature Requests

[johnnyv]

I just wanted to start a thread for feature requests/enhancements. It would be great if you could create a special board for feature requests.

Here are some features that I would like to see.

1) Motion Detection
Improve the usability of the motion detection settings. The Threshold and Sensitivity settings are difficult to understand. Most other systems that I have used simply have a sensitivity setting that seems to incorporate both. It is much easier to eliminate false alarms with systems like Blue Iris.
Add a setting for the minimum number of milliseconds of motion that must occur in order to fire a motion detection event. This could potentially help eliminate triggers from very brief motion.
Create a video on how to configure these settings in different circumstances. Your other videos are helpful and one on setting up motion detection properly is sorely needed.

2) Playback of recordings
Add list of the events so that it is easier to select the event you want to see. The 24 hour timeline for playback makes it difficult to click a precise event unless you zoom in the scale of the time line. This is cumbersome to do each time I want to view an event.
Provide a skip forward / back button to allow the user to skip to the next or previous event in the timeline.

3) Increase password and username length
Six characters is not long enough and provides a very weak level of security. I would like to see this increased to at least 12 characters for each field.

4) Alert emails
Allow users to turn off the Alarm Start and Alarm End email alerts. I suspect that most users only want to receive one email per alert.
Make the snapshot an inline image rather than an attachment so that the user doesn't have to download the file to view it.

5) Snapshots
The system doesn't seem to be saving the Trigger vs Timing setting for snapshots. This is a bug that needs to be fixed. Also, I think that Trigger is a more appropriate default than timing for that setting.

[johnnyv]

I did find that one of the features I requested is already in place (just a little hidden). On the right side of the Playback screen, there is a button labeled "File List." When you click it, it displays a list of the video files on the DVR for each channel. This is a much easier way to browse recorded files.

[heycraig]

To add to the comments about the playback presentation. It would be nice to be able to search all channels by date and timeframe, and have all motion instances listed.

Also, add a playback feature where you can view all channels in sequence for a given day or time period. This would allow the user to play all channels with events played in the order they were captured. I tested a system from a different manufacturer that had this function. The captured videos would play in a continuum. If a frame was not active during a given time period, it was paused. Great feature.

I also need to second johnnyv's suggestion of adding a minimum time that motion must occur to trigger an alarm. This would almost completely eliminate false positives.

I have heard many good things in this forum about Blue Iris. Perhaps it's time to give it a look.

[kd4gfy]

Blue Iris is quite good. But with the 841 camera, PTZ does not work.

[JimSchuuz]

While I think that inline images would be nice in the emails, I don't think it would be practical to incorporate this for several reasons:
1. Inline images are a feature of HTML-formatted email. This would significantly increase the size of the embedded firmware, and would likely require upgraded hardware components like processor, ROM and RAM.
2. Adding the additional code for HTML introduces additional security needs, and therefore increased camera updates (patching) as well.
3. Inline images are not supported by every email client. Most often, when you receive an email with visible graphics in it, what you are seeing is a webpage with the text in the email and the images hosted on a web server as a result of the compatibility issues. This is not possible with cameras like these.
4. Actually inserting images inline and receiving any quantity of email alerts will significantly increase the size of every email, causing storage problems for smartphones and tablets that have only 16 GB or less of space.

Sending email alerts as plain text with attached images is really the only method that's practical, so we need to let this one go.

[larham]

Hello Amcrest,

Please consider a feature for making it easy to turn email notifications on and off from the cloud.

The use-case is as follows:

Normally, I do not want to get motion detection emails. However, when the entire family has left the house, I would like an automatic way to turn on those emails, and vice versa.

In terms of technology, and ideal solution would be accessible to the IFTTT engine, IFTTT.com

Thanks,

Larry

[ThePoopsmith]

I'm for a more friendly playback feature. I'm having issues for snapshots to even happen.

[MrDouf]

I have posted this one on the technical forum;

A Quick turn ON/OFF button on the phone APP so that the camera is enable for motion detection when I leave the house (instead of going into the menu and change the regular schedule).

[ThePoopsmith]

On the dvr interface during playback, if you select 8channel review, instead of having one time line there should be all 8.... This is annoying