Why Kerberos.io over Nest Camera
I did an write up on why I switched off Shinobi video and to Kerberos.io and I'm working on one regarding why I chose it over both that and ZoneMinder. But, another interesting angle is why I'm preferring it over even established bit market players like Nest with their Nest Aware subscription.
What spurred this on was checking my feed today of my detections. Every single one of the daytime detections was a person. In my driveway. Coming up to, or leaving my house.
I get some false positives at night with the snow and headlights. But, in the past 5 hours I've had 0 false positives. Sure, I had to tweak settings to get there. But, Nest would have bombarded me 100 times by now. Even checking my Nest Cam which is now pointing at my front door and sees a lot less activity it already has a small army of alerts.
Why is this important?
I was getting so many a day that I turned off alerts except when I'm away from home for extended periods and I almost never review them later.
In short; It has rendered the service useless.
I prefer false positives over false negatives. But just how awful these established players are at detection and the lack of configuration options makes them unusable.
For the first time since I put a camera outside of my house I get few enough alerts a day that I can actually justify looking through them. Even with the false negatives at night. And it is something I can appreciate.
When you get hundreds a day, it is impossible to review them all. It is even more impossible to want to review them all.
Now that I'm not drowning in them, I stop and look. And what I'm finding is that interesting stuff is happening. I'm catching wildlife. I caught a stranger coming onto my property (turned out just to be a real estate agent leaving her business card behind). The FedEx guy.
I can say with 100% certainty I wouldn't have caught these before. I've only had this setup for a few weeks. And I had my Nest Camera for almost a year before that. I've noticed more going on in this time than I did in the whole time with the Nest Camera. And what that means is that while the things I'm looking at aren't threats. It means that I'm more likely to catch something suspicious or worth looking at this way than I was before.
Yes, it took a bit of knowledge and effort. But, the service is otherwise free and the quality is better. And that says a lot. And Shinobi was even more powerful. And ZoneMinder looks like a decent tool as well. And if you're not worried about containerizing, or getting it working in Linux I'm sure there are easy enough solutions out there for most people.
What spurred this on was checking my feed today of my detections. Every single one of the daytime detections was a person. In my driveway. Coming up to, or leaving my house.
I get some false positives at night with the snow and headlights. But, in the past 5 hours I've had 0 false positives. Sure, I had to tweak settings to get there. But, Nest would have bombarded me 100 times by now. Even checking my Nest Cam which is now pointing at my front door and sees a lot less activity it already has a small army of alerts.
Why is this important?
I was getting so many a day that I turned off alerts except when I'm away from home for extended periods and I almost never review them later.
In short; It has rendered the service useless.
I prefer false positives over false negatives. But just how awful these established players are at detection and the lack of configuration options makes them unusable.
For the first time since I put a camera outside of my house I get few enough alerts a day that I can actually justify looking through them. Even with the false negatives at night. And it is something I can appreciate.
When you get hundreds a day, it is impossible to review them all. It is even more impossible to want to review them all.
Now that I'm not drowning in them, I stop and look. And what I'm finding is that interesting stuff is happening. I'm catching wildlife. I caught a stranger coming onto my property (turned out just to be a real estate agent leaving her business card behind). The FedEx guy.
I can say with 100% certainty I wouldn't have caught these before. I've only had this setup for a few weeks. And I had my Nest Camera for almost a year before that. I've noticed more going on in this time than I did in the whole time with the Nest Camera. And what that means is that while the things I'm looking at aren't threats. It means that I'm more likely to catch something suspicious or worth looking at this way than I was before.
Yes, it took a bit of knowledge and effort. But, the service is otherwise free and the quality is better. And that says a lot. And Shinobi was even more powerful. And ZoneMinder looks like a decent tool as well. And if you're not worried about containerizing, or getting it working in Linux I'm sure there are easy enough solutions out there for most people.
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