I’m little puzzled by how recording to SD card works currently.
I unchecked both motion and sound detection and set Alert Schedule to 9:30AM to 4:00PM, but I saw from camera’s “View Playback” that there are recordings outside the Alert Schedule, ex., 7AM, it looked like a recording by event as it’s only 15 second long.
Logically, if it’s outside Alert Schedule and detection is unchecked, it shouldn’t record anything. This looks like a bug in Alert Schedule/SD Recording feature, isn’t it?
In a home security use case, when I leave home, I want to enable the motion/sound detection and want to record any events to SD card/cloud as well. What happens to the notification/alert recording if Alter Schedule is outside the time frame? i.e., I left home at 7AM, but my Alert Schedule was set to 9:30AM to 4PM. Ideally, it should have an option on Alert Schedule that will record events to SD card/cloud whenever detection is enabled regardless how Alert Schedule is set or we need to have IFTTT service to support Alert Schedule change.
For others, they may not check this option so no alert/recording would occur when detection is enabled but it’s not within the Alert Schedule as they only want Detection/Alert set in the schedule.
The confusion lies in that the Alerts and the mSD card recording are totally separate and independent of one another. The motions/sound settings, sensitivity and alert schedule only apply to the cloud notification alerts. On the other hand, mSD card recording is all or nothing in either continuous or event-only mode.
The cloud clips are limited to 12-15 seconds each with a 5 minute timeout between events for each trigger (motion, sound, smoke, CO). The cloud alert clips are viewed (only) from the Notifications tab of the app.
The mSD card recording is either continuous, or 1-minute segments that are saved if motion is detected anywhere in that segment. The mSD card recording is viewed (only) from the View Playback button accessed from each camera’s Live Stream, or by pulling the card and reading it on a computer.
There are some changes planned for the organization of the app to make all of this a bit more intuitive.
I’m not sure that the two are totally separated. When detection is disabled, what does it mean to SD Recording of events only? TO be consistent and logical, do we expect that events will be generated in SD Recording even though we don’t want any detection on motion or sound?
Essentially, we want to be able to control whether SD Recording should record or not when detection is disabled or a new option to turn it off, i.e., we would have three options:
Events Only - records when any detection triggers an event
Continuous - records all the time
Off when Detection is disabled - doesn't record at all when Motion/Sound Detection is both turned off
The third option would be an important feature for privacy conscious users to give them full control on when it would record or not.
As I said, they are separate and independent. You can have SD card recording set to one of three states: OFF, Continuous or Event Only. These are set in the Advanced section of the camera’s settings (accessed by clicking the gear icon from the live stream). The OFF state for SD card recording is achieved by turning off the “master switch” labeled “Local recording to micro SD Card”.
On the other hand, the settings section Alert Settings controls motion/sound/smoke/CO detection for the purpose of uploading clips to the cloud and generating notifications.
Again, these are completely independent. You can have SD Card recording on while at the same time having motion/sound/smoke/CO alerts turned off. And vice versa.