Netcam Watcher Surveillance Software Blog

I've been very lax and not updated this blog for a long time. I plan to update more often now.

Anyway, we've just released version 2.5, which is a free upgrade for all users. You can get it from the download page here

http://netcam-watcher.com/downloads.php

The main changes are:

1) Performance tab on File > Preferences letting you skip frames on multi camera displays, to improve performance (ie decrease CPU use).

2) Non-motion detection; similar to motion detection but records when motion ceases. Can be used in conjunction with "record for X seconds before motion stops" to see what leads up to motion stopping. We did this for a customer who has moving conveyor belts that sometimes jam up. So this captures the belt stopping, sends out an alarm and also shows what lead up to the stoppage.

3) Now Schedules are checked every 2 minutes to see if cameras are in the proper state; so if Timer is being used and user stops a camera, it will restart 2 mins later.

4) Added support for Sanyo cameras, in particular the new VDC-HD4000. These new cameras are great! Full HD resolution (and more). Day/night. Optical zoom. And many other features for less than $1000

5) ACTi cameras now have an extra "port" field on Edit Camera so you can specify Video and Control ports. Previously it assumed they were the default values. Also using the latest ACTi SDK that fixes problems that some users were having with C++ runtime errors.

The new version has been tested with Windows 7 and works fine with both 32 and 64 bit versions.

Windows 7 is faster than Vista, but still slower than Windows XP. So if you want the best performance, you are still better off with XP

If you're looking for a challenge, get a copy of Microsoft Vista

I got a copy to build a Vista test machine. The installation was pretty easy. But from then on it's all been downhill.

Firstly there is the infamous User Annoyance Control (UAC) which really sucks. This sums it up well..

http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/apple-getamac-security_480x376.mov

So that got turned off. Problem now is that it nags you every time you boot telling you that you are not protecting yourself properly.

Then I spent a day trying to map a network drive from my main machine. It could see it alright but as soon as I tried to access it I got the very helpful error message "Access Denied"

After much screwing about I found the cause. Vista had taken my previous user account, Bob, and upgraded it to Vista. Except it had not done it properly. Somewhere along the line it had called it "End User" instead of "Bob" and the end result was a sabotaged user account that did not function properly.

I had to delete this account and re-create it from scratch.

Yesterday I discovered a more serious problem. It seems that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that Services can no longer interact with the desktop. This is to help us, remember. Well the result is that if you now run NCW as a service it can no longer run on your desktop. It's basically invisible. It still works and records fine. Just you can't see it.

Well that's not quite the whole story; when it starts you get a message telling you a service wants to display a message. If you click "show me" it brings up the NCW screen on it's own desktop. You are meant to look at the "message" and then click OK when you are finished. This is due to the dim MS view that services are console apps that rarely interact with the desktop. They did not bother to find out how people are actually using this feature. Or even provide a way of switching it on or off.

So here's a really good reason to stick with XP

We are talking to Core Technologies, the AlwaysUp people, to try to find a solution to this mess.

So the last couple of months has not seen much in the way of development. We've moved house and offices to a larger place in Pukekohe. We not have a fiber optic Internet link which is giving us up to 10Mbps up and down, which is great.

So now development is back under way, and there are two things in progress : first is an enhancement to Port Activated Motion Detection so that you can monitor the camera while there is no motion. This will not affect too many people as currently I don't think many people use this.

The second thing is a pre-motion buffer which allows you to record for a period before motion occurs. This can be a very useful feature, especially combined with masking.

It's more easily explained with an example. Suppose a camera was watching a birdbath. Now if you masked out the whole scene apart from the birdbath. If you normally did motion detection recording on this scene you would see when birds were in the bath. But if you used pre-buffering, you would see the bird flying up to bath (ie the moments before it gets to the bath). Of course you could replace "bird bath" with "jewelry display case" and "bird" with "suspicious person".