I’m not a customer today but am looking to purchase. Having trolled through the forum I’ve noticed that Netcam Studio 2 seems to be on the cusp of being released soon. With that being said I’m curious what the upgrade path from existing 1.x license holders will be? Will there be a free upgrade, or will there only be free upgrades for those who’ve purchased new licensing within the past X number of days?
Also is there a new feature / upgrade list anywhere that would help in deciding between Netcam and other competitors? There are a few things that seem to be lacking in Netcam today and I’m curious if they’ve been addressed in 2.x.
Hi DM,
Concerning the upgrade to version 2.0. If you buy today there will most likely not be problem upgrading free. What new features will be in NCS 2.0 I have to let @Steve who is in charge over that answer. With this said about the license I am curious about what you think is lacking today. Also, NCS is focusing on a specific market segment that we will as of today continue within.
Thanks,
Henrik
Thanks for the response Henrik and appreciate the confidence with the upgrade license being free.
As for features…
TLS - The implementation today leaves much to be desired. Configuration of it is not within the UI and is relatively lackluster in the ability to control the cipher sets that are supported by the internal web server that is hosting the services. For example I do not want to be able to support any SSL versions or TLS v1.0 - but would like to provide connections greater than TLS 1.1 (this is pretty standard today given things like the Mozilla TLS profile recommendations: Security/Server Side TLS - MozillaWiki). Also things that could make implementation of good practice security would be to support initiatives such as LetsEncrypt instead of recommending to customers to buy an overpriced certificate from an organization such as VeriSign. Today a reverse proxy is the only way to really make this suitable for public exposure unfortunately. (disclosure: I am a security engineer)
CV - The industry is moving towards CV in many respects and simple object detection are becoming more common in competitive products. The ability to recognize people vs pets, cars, etc are becoming the norm. I know there is LP recognition in the software today, although, frustratingly it does not support US plates (probably because of the wide variations per state - but still). The ability to create recording triggers based on some high level CV aspects would be something I would be very interested in if those pieces are in the pipeline. If not within the product I’m wondering if you’ve considered an external pipeline to provide, for example, a video output that has an associated input and API response listener to run the feed or event through custom OpenCV pipeline and back into the platform via the API listener to provide additional metadata to the feed. So… I send a feed to my OpenCV code, that code hooks into the API and sends metadata about the recording to indicate if there was a brown dog in the event. So ultimately expose a way to use Netcam as the central recording authority but allow externalities to decorate the video with more insight in a flexible manner.
Quick Scrub - One of the features I really enjoy about a competing product is the ability to review all motion events for an entire cam/day quickly. It has a mode where I can just hit play and it will scrub through, at whatever speed factor is set, and I can validate in the course of a few minutes if there was anything I need to go back and review. It’s kind of there with timelapse, but even then the timelapse implementation is frustrating with 1.x because there’s no good way to view it without manually creating one.
Cloud Integration - While there are some integrations today (Dropbox/GDrive) I’d like a more robust endpoint in the cloud that I can build workflows around. For example with S3 in AWS I can provision lifecycle management and automatically migrate video archives to Glacier for cost savings. Dropbox and GDrive are comparatively expensive and lackluster in comparison of extending my more customized workflow.
Additional Libraries / Expanded API - It would be great to get a library that is tied to a more flexible language such as Python. In my limited testing I can definitely use what’s there, so I realize this is slightly benign/non-issue, but an official library is always awesome. If anything maybe I end up just writing it and maintaining it on behalf, but obviously a stable API is important. Curious how much this may be expanded / change going forward. And, don’t get me wrong, there’s already a lot there which is very much appreciated.
Finally… What is the ETA of 2.x if that’s kosher to ask publicly?
Thanks so much! And, by no means is the above in any way a slight. NCS seems to be a great product - but a few areas of concern for me before I pull the trigger on buying a few licenses.
Edit: Also - why was this thread unlisted @Henrik ?
Hi,
Thanks for your suggestions and input. A lot of rely interesting prospects. If this would be in NCS 2.0 it would most likely be another price tag and also most likely a paid upgrade from earlier versions. Even maybe another product targeted for a different segment? I think it would also be a couple of more hours in development before NCS 2.0 can be released
What also is of importance is that we are on a strict cpu usage budget. The market for IP cameras develops rapidly into sensor elements with megapixels. Using these cams together with a good FPS and also recorded FPS together with what we do today use a considerable amount of CPU power. Next step is also h.265 that will use more CPU power. I am not sure how your suggestions relate to that apart from CV that is of cause very interesting, but is also consume cpu power. Today we are on the Windows platform with its pros and cons. I don´t think we will go into FPGAs or ASICS even if that certainly would be interesting.
If you can take the strict cpu budget into account in your suggestions it would of cause be even more interesting.
