I have a Yale Front Door camera which detects motion and records a short clip on an internal SD card when motion occurs. It also has an internet connection via wifi, and sends me an alert on my phone when motion is detected. An app on my phone allows me to see what is happening - either after an alert or at any other time. Pretty standard stuff, I guess.
However, what I don't understand is how much internet bandwidth it's using. Is it likely to be sending data continuously, or only when it's sending an alert or when someone is using an app to view live or recorded footage? [The information supplied by Yale with the camera is ludicrously minimal - and certainly doesn't answer such questions!]
It doesn't matter too much here at home because I have an unlimited internet connection. But I'm considering installing a similar camera in my holiday flat so that I can keep an eye on that when I'm not there - which is currently most of the time. At the flat, I have a 4G internet connection and my current deal with an EE data SIM only gives me 10GB per month.
If anyone can throw any light on how these things work in practice, I'll be very grateful.
That is true, but it depends even more on how much of the time - and under what circumstances - it's actually transmitting data . That's what I'm trying to get a handle on!
1) Not Cloud based (or so they claim).
2) Mains powered (there is an older Yale product with a USB cable, which you don't want). There is a mains cable and plug.
3) Wifi communications. They could not be bothered to tell us it is 2.4GHz. If your domicile has foil backed boards, there might not be any Wifi outdoors. Signal quality affects datarate.
4) Sends an alert to you (method unknown). This presumably uses your bandwidth.
5) You can log into the camera and review footage recorded on a micro SD. The micro SD may reside under a flimsy cover on the *top* of the unit. There is no mention of whether the footage is protected by crypto, or you can pop out the micro SD and just give to the policeman.
6) 90 degree viewing angle.
7) HD resolution (1920x1080). This is sufficient resolution to obtain police-quality footage of a hallway. The head of a villain could be pretty tiny, in a back yard scenario.
8) Has a Passive Infrared sensor for basic villain detection. These can be sensitive enough to pick up the body heat of a mouse.
9) App allows setting an AOI. After PIR triggers, camera decides whether anything is in the AOI. I would not rely on this feature actually working.
10) Presumably fixed recording interval after PIR trips. Could be 2 minutes of video. Who knows without documentation.
My estimate of recording datarate (no documentation) is 2MB/sec. You can use television data transmission rate, for your HD recording estimate. If the device were to record all day long, it would fill the 128GB card. Since the reviews say "the recording is clear", it means that excessive DCT (discrete cosine transform to frequency domain) has not been applied to the thing, and some amount of high frequency components are recorded. Excessive compression makes images "soft", and no reviewer mentions "soft" as a detail. So it could be a shade over 2MB/sec. While cameras exist that record "raw" and without compression, then the advert would have to bleat onwards about the "special high speed SD you need". And there is no mention of even Class 10 for the SD. Because there is no documentation.
Some of the sellers, do not allow returns! They are drop-shipping from the manufacturer. Maybe you can't even look at the box (because it has a QR code on it, to activate the product).
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