I could use your insights on what you want the Ring snapshots for.
Already a few versions back of this Ring PI, I added the ability to retrieve and store snapshots based on your selection criteria :
1. In the standard or user defined directory.
2. Subdirectory based on device ID.
3. Options: don't store, only when motion, when motion or when camera generates one (could be as fast as each 30 seconds), when motion or on a user defined period (ex. every hour).
Recently I began coding up "managing" these snapshots and for me a few things stood out (or confirmed my reluctance) quickly:
1. If you store all snapshots made by the camera, it very quickly becomes unmanageable. For example, I had this function on for a while and gathered 35,000 snapshots and when I was testing some webpages, I had been working on (almost identical to the video clip webpage), not only can you not add 35K elements to a webpage, it takes too long and fails.
2. If you "chunk" these 35k snapshots say in chunks of a hundred or perhaps one thousand, looking through them is tedious and still not clear what you'd be looking for.
So here's the question, why do you need this?
Answering from my own view:
1. to capture events, but why? The cameras can generate videos when there is motion, isn't this much easier? Now I believe this comes at a monthly cost, is it this we are trying to avoid (have to admit I have no idea if you can operate the cameras without a subscription or what exactly you can do without a subscription). I'm ok this being a valid reason, just trying to get feedback.
2. Store all these snapshots on a big disk for some off-line processing or for some other purpose. Again, if this is for event capturing, isn't the video clip a few orders of magnitude more efficient?
3. You like some time-elapse videos, I can see that, but having the same time-elapse everyday, wouldn't that be boring rather quickly. Not to mention, you would have to turn these into a time-elapse video.
4. If you like a series of snapshots of just the motion event and want to keep those, that can be done with the features included today and that I can sorta see. Having that said, the series of videos would do exactly the same and probably better because taking snapshots when there is motion, seems to be hit and miss with Ring. From my own experience and others that have gone before us, it seems that (more so with) battery operated cameras, when they are recording, they pretty much ignore any other commands, such as taking snapshots.
5. Could I add support to turn these snapshots into , say a daily video? Well that adds another level of complexity, as I would have to depend on some 3rd pty app to do that, and good luck now to do this on all flavors of Windows and Linux, not to mention licensing rights when i was to bundle this with the PI. Having the end user being responsible to install said app, well I can see how that is going to go.
Now here is the teaser (assuming you are still hell bent on getting these snapshots
), I found a command to create and retrieve time-elapse videos from the snapshots the camera took by itself. But with everything I experienced so far with Ring, it comes with its limitations and quirkiness as none of these features has been created for API hackers to use, but made to support their apps.
So here is what I've seen:
1. So far I've only been able to make these snapshot videos of non-motion events, so what exactly is the purpose (except from using your app on your phone and scroll through time to see time-elapse pictures).
2. Ring seems to "chop" these into videos of approximately 10 seconds. for example: I instruct the Ring server to generate this video for say, yesterday, the server will respond with an undefined amount of links to small clips, so not one video based on an input time range (say one for each hour or day or something on request) but based on the number of snapshots the Ring server stored and glued together into a ~10 second clip. This presents again for me, quite a challenge how to use this or present this to the end-user being you.
So what are your thoughts?
Already a few versions back of this Ring PI, I added the ability to retrieve and store snapshots based on your selection criteria :
1. In the standard or user defined directory.
2. Subdirectory based on device ID.
3. Options: don't store, only when motion, when motion or when camera generates one (could be as fast as each 30 seconds), when motion or on a user defined period (ex. every hour).
Recently I began coding up "managing" these snapshots and for me a few things stood out (or confirmed my reluctance) quickly:
1. If you store all snapshots made by the camera, it very quickly becomes unmanageable. For example, I had this function on for a while and gathered 35,000 snapshots and when I was testing some webpages, I had been working on (almost identical to the video clip webpage), not only can you not add 35K elements to a webpage, it takes too long and fails.
2. If you "chunk" these 35k snapshots say in chunks of a hundred or perhaps one thousand, looking through them is tedious and still not clear what you'd be looking for.
So here's the question, why do you need this?
Answering from my own view:
1. to capture events, but why? The cameras can generate videos when there is motion, isn't this much easier? Now I believe this comes at a monthly cost, is it this we are trying to avoid (have to admit I have no idea if you can operate the cameras without a subscription or what exactly you can do without a subscription). I'm ok this being a valid reason, just trying to get feedback.
2. Store all these snapshots on a big disk for some off-line processing or for some other purpose. Again, if this is for event capturing, isn't the video clip a few orders of magnitude more efficient?
3. You like some time-elapse videos, I can see that, but having the same time-elapse everyday, wouldn't that be boring rather quickly. Not to mention, you would have to turn these into a time-elapse video.
4. If you like a series of snapshots of just the motion event and want to keep those, that can be done with the features included today and that I can sorta see. Having that said, the series of videos would do exactly the same and probably better because taking snapshots when there is motion, seems to be hit and miss with Ring. From my own experience and others that have gone before us, it seems that (more so with) battery operated cameras, when they are recording, they pretty much ignore any other commands, such as taking snapshots.
5. Could I add support to turn these snapshots into , say a daily video? Well that adds another level of complexity, as I would have to depend on some 3rd pty app to do that, and good luck now to do this on all flavors of Windows and Linux, not to mention licensing rights when i was to bundle this with the PI. Having the end user being responsible to install said app, well I can see how that is going to go.
Now here is the teaser (assuming you are still hell bent on getting these snapshots
), I found a command to create and retrieve time-elapse videos from the snapshots the camera took by itself. But with everything I experienced so far with Ring, it comes with its limitations and quirkiness as none of these features has been created for API hackers to use, but made to support their apps.So here is what I've seen:
1. So far I've only been able to make these snapshot videos of non-motion events, so what exactly is the purpose (except from using your app on your phone and scroll through time to see time-elapse pictures).
2. Ring seems to "chop" these into videos of approximately 10 seconds. for example: I instruct the Ring server to generate this video for say, yesterday, the server will respond with an undefined amount of links to small clips, so not one video based on an input time range (say one for each hour or day or something on request) but based on the number of snapshots the Ring server stored and glued together into a ~10 second clip. This presents again for me, quite a challenge how to use this or present this to the end-user being you.
So what are your thoughts?
). If you just want to keep snapshots when motion happens, you set them on the settings page (general tab) and select for example the snapshot action to be "only when motion events", it will store all the motion snapshots, without overwriting them in a dedicated/per device subdirectory. In the version available on line, there is no support to look at these except to go into the subdirectory and use whatever tools you want and do whatever you want with them, hence the purpose of this thread to understand what I should try to support that makes sense to a larger audience. I'm about to post a new version, that can show the snapshots, delete them etc. but if you have thousands of snapshots, this is a totally useless webpage (in my opinion).
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