Record longer before motion detection events
When using motion detection recording (not continuous recording), the Tapo app records 1~2 seconds before a motion detection event happens. I would the amount of time before the event to be longer, ideally a custom setting for each camera. At the moment I have enabled continuous recording so I can manually rewind a little, this way I get to see what happend before the motion detection event.
In the following recording timeline diagram, the top bar represents how it works at the moment: motion is detected at [1], and recording starts only 1~2 seconds before [1]. The bottom bar shows how I would like this to work: motion is detected at [1], but recording starts at [2], in other words, before the event happens. The time before the event t is specified in the camera settings by the user. To do this, the camera would need to loop-record a few minutes in case motion is detected so that it can recover the footage before the event when required:
Hopefully that makes sense, let me know if something isn't clear. Happy new year!
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Hello,
Thank you very much for submitting your feature request. We have taken note of your suggestion.
If other users have the same request, please vote on this thread or leave your comments.
Best Regards
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@Solla-topee I would also like to see this feature. I currently monitor a 10 year old vcr based system that has this feature and it has caught several wrong-doers in my neighborhood.
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@DaiLafing It is frustrating to say the least. At the moment I have my cameras set to continuous recording so at least I can rewind a little and see the events leading up to the trigger, however the timeline is very low resolution and if I so much as move it left or right by 1 pixel that skips potentially minutes of recording time unless you zoom in as far in as possible and even then it's too fiddly.
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@Solla-topee what more do you need? People have been voting on this since the start of the year, as other forum posts prove that people have Ben talking about it for even longer. Why have you not Ouse this update through? I struggle to believe it's a difficult project and probably only a day or two that a single developer can take care of.
Edit: my biggest frustration in the reliability in which Tapo cameras start recording. I could get half way down the side of my house before my Tapo cameras picked me up. We can be walking around the living room for a few hours - dinner, movie, washing dishes etc - all that'll get picked up from the internal cameras is a smattering of 5-6 10-20 second clips. Yes. In over an hour we can expect a maximum of 1-2 minutes worth of footage.
Furthermore, the cameras continually drop down the SD recording when I always set them to HD.
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@DingoBingo This is probably the biggest weakness of Tapo cameras. For real-time monitoring they work ok. I work from home and I normally have 3 cameras set up to check on my cat (entrance, cat bed, feeder), those are fine since I just want to get a notification when my cat gets home and then to see which of these three "usual spots" she is at, so for that it works since my cat entering the property is not a safety-critical event. However, the other 4 cameras I have are pointed at my porch, my garage gate, and two other spots to capture intrusions. Luckily I've not been targeted yet but I am pretty sure these cameras would not pick up the critical bits of footage reliably. They some how have an uncanny tendency to miss the bad stuff and then record a few seconds of irrelevant footage. The only solution at the moment is to enable continuous recording, and even then it sucks because you can't view what has just been recorded until the camera is done recording (you basically need to wait a minute or two before it lets you see it). You get the mobile notification but when you check the footage in real time the intruder is already out of the frame. By that the time you get to watch the recorded footage to check whether it was an intrusion or, say, a butterfly that triggered the event, the intruder has already stolen half your house and left. This needs to be immediate, any delay is unacceptable.
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