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I also bought a Dropcam Pro a few years ago, and from memory, it was pretty clear that it was cloud based. I've been pretty happy with it, but my goals are diff

I also bought a Dropcam Pro a few years ago, and from memory, it was pretty clear that it was cloud based. I've been pretty happy with it, but my goals are different. I suspect you weren't the target market for Dropcam. It was sold, and is sold as a turnkey camera that works out of the box, that anybody can setup on minutes, has native mobile apps that let you watch from anywhere in the world, and records up to 30 days of footage, with motion/sound (and more person) alerts. In contrast, I've also setup local hosted cameras (Unifi video cameras) for somebody else recording onto a rack mounted Dell R610 with S3 backups. Different needs. Many of the features of Dropcam (now Nest Cam) aren't really possible without it being on the cloud. In particular, the new person alerts take advantage of ML in the cloud, as does the new Sightline feature that lets you scrub quickly over a few days in seconds.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Many of the features of Dropcam (now Nest Cam) aren't really possible without it being on my butt. Oh, they totally are. They just chose not to do it this way. Some of that is because of it being a "turnkey" solution, but let's not pretend the cloud is required for most of them. > In particular, the new person alerts take advantage of ML in my butt It shouldn't need to. Detecting people on video streams is something your smartphone camera now does on-chip. At most it requires a DSP unit. > as does the new Sightline feature that lets you scrub quickly over a few days in seconds. That's just a video player with some added precalc on the video stream. You could have all those features with your own storage server and interface in a local network. It's just that it is a little less "turnkey", so it wouldn't sell as well.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Nice use of cloud-to-butt extension :) Anyway, I fully agree. And they could even use the cloud as a synchronization mechanism without having to pass the actual data through it, or passing it only in an encrypted form.
- victorhooi 10y ago
  You suggest these features (people detection, timeline scrubbing etc.) are possible with a locally hosted solution - are you aware of any such alternatives? And please don't mention things like Motion or ZoneMinder unless you've actually tried them. And if you have tried them, well, why are you still arguing with me =). It's sad, and I wish it were otherwise, but there are not very many good OSS solutions I'm aware of in this space. There are commercial solutions (e.g. Ubiquiti's Unifi Video line, or Blue Iris) that handle the NVR side well, but don't really do the extra stuff well. I suspect you are under-estimating both the infrastructure required to do this well, or the engineering effort. It's like say, a search engine. Yes, you could write a web crawler in your basement, and host it on a few commodity servers. It would return results when you put in search terms. It might just take a while to react to updates on pages. Or it might only crawl a subset of the internet. But you could argue that there's no need for a remote "cloud" service to do it, when you can do it yourself on-premise. However, my argument is that there's a difference between doing something well and just doing it. Or take Netflix - yes, you could transcode video yourself into various formats, and serve that up from your home server. However, if you wanted to share this with somebody in another country, unless you also had geo-proximate caches in those countries that mirrored your home server, you might find some issues there. It's workable, just not very good. > It shouldn't need to. Detecting people on video streams is something your smartphone camera now does on-chip. At most it requires a DSP unit. There's a difference between detecting a face in a photograph (and even that can be tricky sometimes), and identifying people (versus say, large animals etc.) in arbitrary video footage in realtime with a reasonable degree of certainty. Or are you aware of phones that already do this kind of thing? (If so, I apologise, because I'm unaware of this). > That's just a video player with some added precalc on the video stream. It's actually not..lol. There's a public blog post which I admit is a bit market-y https://nest.com/blog/2016/09/08/we-ve-changed-the-game/ https://nest.com/blog/2016/09/08/we-ve-changed-the-game/ But essentially, they use ML to figure out the most "representative" shot for each block, thus distill several hours of footage into several hundred key frames, and allowing you to scrub through them quickly. The blog post has an animated GIF that shows the UI in action: https://d2qxwxxauf5yxr.cloudfront.net/blog/images/2016-09-08/sightline-3d44325a09.gif https://d2qxwxxauf5yxr.cloudfront.net/blog/images/2016-09-08... The trick isn't serving up the image stream - it's figuring out what to put into it. (I admit I'm slightly biased here, because I watched a presentation from some of the engineers involved, talking about how they implemented it, and the effort that went into it).
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  Ahem, Cloud to Butt is enabled ;)
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I know ;).

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> Many of the features of Dropcam (now Nest Cam) aren't really possible without it being on my butt. Oh, they totally are. They just chose not to do it this way. Some of that is because of it being a "turnkey" solution, but let's not pretend the cloud is required for most of them. > In particular, the new person alerts take advantage of ML in my butt It shouldn't need to. Detecting people on video streams is something your smartphone camera now does on-chip. At most it requires a DSP unit. > as does the new Sightline feature that lets you scrub quickly over a few days in seconds. That's just a video player with some added precalc on the video stream. You could have all those features with your own storage server and interface in a local network. It's just that it is a little less "turnkey", so it wouldn't sell as well.

icebraining 10y ago
Nice use of cloud-to-butt extension :) Anyway, I fully agree. And they could even use the cloud as a synchronization mechanism without having to pass the actual data through it, or passing it only in an encrypted form.
victorhooi 10y ago
You suggest these features (people detection, timeline scrubbing etc.) are possible with a locally hosted solution - are you aware of any such alternatives? And please don't mention things like Motion or ZoneMinder unless you've actually tried them. And if you have tried them, well, why are you still arguing with me =). It's sad, and I wish it were otherwise, but there are not very many good OSS solutions I'm aware of in this space. There are commercial solutions (e.g. Ubiquiti's Unifi Video line, or Blue Iris) that handle the NVR side well, but don't really do the extra stuff well. I suspect you are under-estimating both the infrastructure required to do this well, or the engineering effort. It's like say, a search engine. Yes, you could write a web crawler in your basement, and host it on a few commodity servers. It would return results when you put in search terms. It might just take a while to react to updates on pages. Or it might only crawl a subset of the internet. But you could argue that there's no need for a remote "cloud" service to do it, when you can do it yourself on-premise. However, my argument is that there's a difference between doing something well and just doing it. Or take Netflix - yes, you could transcode video yourself into various formats, and serve that up from your home server. However, if you wanted to share this with somebody in another country, unless you also had geo-proximate caches in those countries that mirrored your home server, you might find some issues there. It's workable, just not very good. > It shouldn't need to. Detecting people on video streams is something your smartphone camera now does on-chip. At most it requires a DSP unit. There's a difference between detecting a face in a photograph (and even that can be tricky sometimes), and identifying people (versus say, large animals etc.) in arbitrary video footage in realtime with a reasonable degree of certainty. Or are you aware of phones that already do this kind of thing? (If so, I apologise, because I'm unaware of this). > That's just a video player with some added precalc on the video stream. It's actually not..lol. There's a public blog post which I admit is a bit market-y https://nest.com/blog/2016/09/08/we-ve-changed-the-game/ https://nest.com/blog/2016/09/08/we-ve-changed-the-game/ But essentially, they use ML to figure out the most "representative" shot for each block, thus distill several hours of footage into several hundred key frames, and allowing you to scrub through them quickly. The blog post has an animated GIF that shows the UI in action: https://d2qxwxxauf5yxr.cloudfront.net/blog/images/2016-09-08/sightline-3d44325a09.gif https://d2qxwxxauf5yxr.cloudfront.net/blog/images/2016-09-08... The trick isn't serving up the image stream - it's figuring out what to put into it. (I admit I'm slightly biased here, because I watched a presentation from some of the engineers involved, talking about how they implemented it, and the effort that went into it).
DiabloD3 10y ago
Ahem, Cloud to Butt is enabled ;)
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I know ;).