Sighthound users?

I searched the forums here and it seems there are a few Sighthound users, but their last comments are over a year old.

Anyone currently a user? Happy with it? Concerns? I've tried ZoneMinder and ShinobiCCTV and both have been adventures in bad documentation and head-scratchingly unreliable performance.

This was my opinion of Sighthound:

Good stuff:

Lots of detection options, rules and ways to differentiate what is "detected"
Small CPU Footprint, especially when compared to Security Spy, VitaminD, etc.
Easy to set up and use, very user friendly
Works on a Mac and I have a few of those

Not so good stuff:

What was detected was wrong.... a lot. So if I asked the software to only send me a notification for a "person" detection, I found about 50% of the "people" were categorized as "unknown" so there was no notification. If I set "unknown" to send notifications, my phone would ping non-stop
Communication from Sighthound to Indigo is tricky, but possible with the rule editor using the command function (if I'm remember that correctly)
No communication for indigo to Sighthound. (I wanted to automate detection.... like silence the front yard notifications for 10min after a front yard detection so I don't get 30 notifications while unloading groceries..... not possible with Sighthound)

Questionable Stuff:

When I was doing a couple trial periods, I continually asked about the API for sighthound so I could better integrate with Indigo, I was never able to obtain it.
If I had access to the software API and could automate Sighthound from Indigo, I would probably take another crack at it.

My conclusion was all the cool lights, bells and whistles were worthless for me. The accuracy was about 50/50. I needed something that I could automate through Indigo. So I went a different route.

I've wrapped up testing Sighthound and was pretty impressed with it... until I tried SecuritySpy.

Sighthound still has the lead when it comes to ease of use, particularly in viewing of captured video streams and setting up camera triggers, but not by much. The feature set of SecuritySpy even without its Indigo plug in is phenomenal. I just wish it wasn't quite so expensive, but in this you definitely get what you pay for.

I'm testing SecuritySpy now, but I feel pretty confident there's a purchase coming up soon.

A big cost consideration I had was on system requirements. https://www.bensoftware.com/securityspy ... lator.html
I can’t find the calculator for sight hound , but I had looked it up previously and it was much lower that SS. So for myself with 12+ cameras, that would necessitate a relatively new and top end ($$$) Mac to run SS. Versus SH with could run on an older Mac mini or iMac.. maybe the requirements have changed over the years or I read the comparison wrong, but I’m kinda curious about what other people are using for hardware to run SS.

Sighthound also had much more trouble dealing with a couple of flaky cameras than SS does. SS's diagnostic tools also showed me something I wasn't aware of on my network--one camera that's rather distant from my access point is responsible for about 80% of the dropped packets across all my cameras.

Time to move that one.

One thing I remember from an email correspondence between myself and SS..... The system requirements plunge steeply if you aren't recording. If you are just using SS to view and trigger events, then it consumes far less resources.... but I didn't get figures and the site calculator doesn't have an option for "no recording." ..... I thought about using SS as a liaison between the cameras and Indigo and then leave the NVR in place to just do the event recordings.

Long story short.... while trying to make an unbuntu flash drive, I accidentally wiped a iMac and replaced the whole OS. So I experimented with Shinobi (sp?) and wasn't impressed. Either way, I ended up using the SMTPd plugin to send fake email notifications from my NVR to indigo (for virtual motion devices) and scripting to put images in control pages, emails, pushover messages, etc.

just saw this thread. I have had SH for several years. Its' people detection is excellent, but I found it difficult to translate these detections into actions in Indigo. I've been using motion detectors from Zwave, Insteon and Ademco, but all produce falsing. So, I gave up and have now gone with SS. It is true that any overlays, post processing, recompression, etc will exact a huge toll on your processing, so I'm running it all with no recompression, etc. I'm using the Cynical SS plugin to relay "human detection" and "vehicle detection" and generate image capture and email send. Not perfect, and am looking at the Pushover plugin to see if it can be better.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. so as not to hijack the thread, maybe just ping me or post a link?

Pushover plugin to see if it can be better.

There are 2 main reasons I use pushover and both can be summarized with customizability.

I use pushover for all my indigo messages for consistency and for customizability. With my pushover account, I have separate application tokens that I can use for different things. When you use the pushover plugin, you use the one application token. I still use that and it comes through as an "indigo" notification with a little indigo icon. (You can set an icon for each application under your pushover account.). I have separate application tokens for other event types; climate, security, access control, network, etc.. Using a python script to send a pushover message you can select the application token you want to use and it will ping with that unique icon.

The other thing you can do with pushover (also via script), for camera images, if there is any delay or the image isn't immediately available, it will still send the notification and repeat the notification later once the image is available.