Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuzzythinker | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, can someone tell me why I should pay for this vs. ~$50 webcam + < $9/mo for electricity (quote for a plug-in wall pc is $5/mo for electricity) that comes with motion detection capture? Here, I have full access to the video and analyze it if needed after 2 weeks or years?

View on HN

    apt-get install motion

And a bit of hacking should get you something similar, if very possibly not quite as polished.

Of course, their target market is people who don't want to do any hacking - and there are a ton of those people, so something simple and convenient might do well.

Edit

From their comments above, it looks like it's a little bit more complicated than just capture on motion detect. I think they need a killer demo, as they really need to point out how they're better.

There's also the ultra complicated open source solution zoneminder.

HighlightCam works when there's continuous motion. Even at a busy party, the algorithm would pick out when people talked in front of the camera or some guy fell off a table. Think of it as smart time-lapse, rather than just a collection of motion-heavy segments.

Oh yeah, and we also take audio into account.

Is there an example of the busy party scenario? It is difficult to see what you mean from the video on the home page or the video on the about page.

Edit

Actually, our Justin.tv page demonstrates what processing of high-motion videos looks like (source vids are 5mins long):

http://www.highlightcam.com/justin.tv/

-----

The About page video is 60 minutes long, with motion for maybe 30 minutes. The highlight video is 50 seconds of the most interesting motion.

http://highlightcam.com/about/

The threshold adjusts automatically, so you'd get just under a minute for both one rabbit twitching its ears, or 30 rabbits getting a bundle of carrots.

Yeah, we should really find a good non-confidential party demo :> Maybe we'll film a party this weekend?

Got it. I imagine it is rather difficult to put together a demo for this kind of thing without trying one's patience. Definitely having a video of motion vs. interesting/highlighted motion would be convincing to both tech and non-tech individuals.

Yes, if this is your first TC article have a party to celebrate that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com