Before HS4, I had my cameras working great, now....

[ewkearns]

OK, I'm (quite) a bit exasperated that I can't get UltraSightHound working under HS4. Before, (for instance) I had windows defined in Sight Hound that defined triggers that alerted me when someone drove into my driveway or walked up my walk (or sent an email, or made a sound alert, or turned on a light at night, and on and on. Now, I don't seem to find any usefulness in the HS4 cameras. Am I just missing the whole concept or are they just there to watch?

How are other folks using cameras to determine the direction of motion and/or intrusion in an outdoor setting? I'm alone most of the time and if I am at the pool or in the workshop or otherwise removed from the doorbell, I am unaware of intrusion, package delivery, etc.

Help! Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[Guest]

BlueIris.

IMHO, Cameras/DVR management is not something you want as a feature/side project of some other software; unless your requirements are very limited.

Otherwise not familiar with sighthound but hopefully you should be able to interact with HS via MQTT or JSON.

[Dweber85rc]

OK, I'm (quite) a bit exasperated that I can't get UltraSightHound working under HS4. Before, (for instance) I had windows defined in Sight Hound that defined triggers that alerted me when someone drove into my driveway or walked up my walk (or sent an email, or made a sound alert, or turned on a light at night, and on and on. Now, I don't seem to find any usefulness in the HS4 cameras. Am I just missing the whole concept or are they just there to watch?

How are other folks using cameras to determine the direction of motion and/or intrusion in an outdoor setting? I'm alone most of the time and if I am at the pool or in the workshop or otherwise removed from the doorbell, I am unaware of intrusion, package delivery, etc.

Help! Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Well, Ultra has discontinued support on all the plugins pretty much, so unfortunately you are SOL. HS3 plugins were all supposed to work under HS4 but without the dev around you are kinda hosed. But that being said, I use Blue Iris for my cameras and interface that with homeseer. I use MQTT to handle the alerts for motion etc, and use the homeseer netcam plugin to send snapshots via pushover based on specific events, that can also be done over MQTT or HTTP JSON, but the HS netcam plugin was easier to implement for me. Works well, while homeseer can do some cameras natively, blue iris was built for it and is far more versatile. This gives me the best of both worlds.

[ewkearns]

OK, y'all, I'll report back as soon as I master my 2nd Z-Net issues. SH is a LOT easier to use, but BI is clearly the Swiss Army Knife of IP cameras. I have it reporting and am fine-tuning the demise of false positives, taking out cats, raccoons, flopping limbs, and Chinese balloons... (came so close to the house I could see it and the Raptors zooming around it). We need to put together a repository of methods to communicate with HS, including PTZ presets and motion. It appears that there is enough built into BI and HS4 that MQTT isn't mandatory, nor is JSON (but can be used)!