Fun with v1.3

[Zarkov]

Just downloaded v1.3, and it's great!  Some thoughts that are only now obvious because I can look at recordings:

- Obviously you have to decide when to interpret a motion trigger as a new, unique event.  Clearly a pause of a second between triggers is too short, and a minute is too long.  Some experimentation seems to indicate the lockout time for new triggers is about 20 seconds.  Is that right?

- It seems to me that if there is no motion in the frame, no new frames are sent.  This is logical for a bandwidth-constrained system, but it was not obvious until I could look at recordings.

- One anticipated use of iCam is as a burglar alarm.  However, if the bad guy gets in, one of the first things he's going to take is the PC.  If your recordings of him getting in are on the PC, you have no evidence to present to the police.  Right now, your only hope is to snap a picture of the screen while the triggered event is being streamed to you.  A better option would be to save all the images that get to the iPhone in the Camera Roll automatically.  Any chance?

- Pictures are presently stored in [user]/pictures/iCam source motion events/[gigantic arbitrary alphanumeric sequence]/[date-time stamp].  Can we rename the [gigantic arbitrary alphanumeric sequence] with our camera name, or will images get "lost"?

Marvelous app!  Congratulations!

[Stefan]

Thanks for the great comments, questions, and feedback!

We're glad that iCam 1.3 is finally out, and that people are finding the new features we've implemented useful.

To reply to your comments / questions:

1. A new Motion Event is created when it has been at least 30 seconds since the last time motion was detected, yes. Anything less than that and it is considered to be part of the same event.

2. That is correct. Motion Event Images are only stored when motion is detected. This has a number of benefits when it comes to bandwidth constraints, disk storage space, etc.

3. You're right, if the burglar takes your computer then he's taking all of the evidence with him. One solution to this that we tested is to have the Motion Events saved to an external storage space, like MobileMe's iDisk or Amazon S3, or any off-site server or computer that you have mounted or mapped a drive to. Saving the images to your iPhone in iCam before your computer is stolen isn't a great solution since you have to pull out your iPhone and launch iCam before it happens. If they're saved to your iDisk, then you can get to them from anywhere, including your iPhone.

4. The "gigantic arbitrary alphanumeric sequence" is actually not arbitrary at all. It is a SHA-1 hash of the unique hardware identifier or MJPEG URL of your camera so that all of the Motion Events can be kept separate for each camera if you run multiple iCamSources from the same computer or if you change your camera's name in the iCamSource. So yes, if you change the folder name, your events will be "lost" as far as iCam is concerned.

[Zarkov]

Many thanks for the clear and prompt answers to my questions.  I hadn't thought through the fact that iCam had to be running on the phone to store the pictures, but of course that's obvious in retrospect.  I REALLY like the idea of autosaving the MJPEG sequence to something like MobileMe or S3.  I'm not a subscriber, but that might push me over the threshold.

[Zarkov]

You know, a really neat way to do this would be with Dropbox support.  If you can arrange for the iCam Source to put the MJPEGs in a Dropbox folder on the desktop, it will not only save it in the Cloud, it will put a copy on your iPhone the next time you sync!  And it's free, unlike MobileMe!

[Stefan]

Excellent suggestion! Thanks!

[aen333]

In case anyone considers using dropbox if you sign up using this link https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTMxMjUxMzQ5 you automatically get an extra 250 megabytes free!

[Coguar]

how to setup it with idisk ?


tnx

[Jay]

I haven't used this much myself, but I think you need to turn on iDisk Sync in System Preferences -> MobileMe -> iDisk (on your Mac).   Then in your iCamSource window, click the "Change" button and select "iDisK" from the right column, and then select whichever folder you want to store the data in.

[Zarkov]

I haven't used this much myself, but I think you need to turn on iDisk Sync in System Preferences -> MobileMe -> iDisk (on your Mac).   Then in your iCamSource window, click the "Change" button and select "iDisK" from the right column, and then select whichever folder you want to store the data in.

I'd recommend using an alias instead of changing the place where the pictures are stored.  That way you have a copy on the iCamSouce machine and in the cloud.