Camera events: the recording mode for the PC you already have

[spb-andrey]

A home setup is rarely a server. It is an old laptop, an office PC or a fanless mini box with a handful of cameras. Detection on every stream sets the limit, and the fan at 3 a.m. is why people switch it off.

Guardian Eye 3.4.0 adds a fourth recording mode, Camera events. Most IP cameras from the last few years detect motion, people, line crossing or tampering on their own chip and report it over ONVIF. Guardian Eye subscribes to those reports and starts the clip when the camera says so. Your computer does no detecting. It only writes the clips.

What that means for you:

• No GPU, no USB accelerator, no upgrade. Any PC that writes video files is enough, and it stays quiet and cool at night.
• The rules you already set up on the camera's web page become the recording trigger: intrusion zones, line crossing, people detection. Nothing to set up twice.
• Sabotage counts too. Lens covered, camera turned away, image gone dark or blinded by a light: the camera reports tampering and a clip starts. Sound triggers too, on models with audio analytics.
• Your own detection zones still apply. An object reported inside an area you excluded starts nothing, so you keep the last word.
• What the camera sends lands in the event history, even what starts no clip, like digital inputs and video loss. Triggers carry a snapshot and go out as alerts.
• A spare phone running our WebCamera app is one of these cameras: it reports the people and objects it recognised, not a bare alarm.

Guardian Eye collapses repeated states from chatty cameras into one clip per event, pre-roll stays three seconds, and the mode shows up only for cameras that advertise ONVIF events.