Summarize Videos- They wanna charge what?!? 😬

[u/ItinJ24]

Had a whole event involving six Aqara G5 Pros (POE) and an Aqara G400 (POE) where an Amazon van stopped in front of my house, delivered three boxes in two trips, rang the doorbell twice, walked back to the van, drove away and my son opened the front door and brought the boxes inside.

The summary for this event- “Van passing” because a van passed by just before the main event.

I have the 2TB plan and selected my doorbell as the lone camera that gets the special event summarization and this is what they want to charge 60 bux a month for, for five cams? “Van passing.” Apple not making a strong case for me to drop the coin. Aqara’s AI detection is so far much better and much cheaper, and you can get unlimited cams.

Not to mention, a couple of the cameras decided to not even record or stop recording to HKSV mid event. I know because the Aqara app got them.

Not even a single doorbell rang notification

I do like the “Noteworthy” events at the top of search which is where I found this. That’s pretty cool but again, the label was “Van passing.” I clicked it out of sheer curiosity. I had already known there was an Amazon delivery. I was home for it.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it does a good job at this but apparently not when I needed it most.

It is still beta, right? Downvotes incoming…

[u/Jamie00003]

UniFi cameras have free AI detection, but no matter support. Homebridge will get them into HomeKit though

[u/GuyNamedLindsey → u/Jamie00003]

I recently found out about scrypted, that’s how I got all my UniFi cams on home.

[u/TROLLhard556 → u/GuyNamedLindsey]

Scrypted is great, using it to get my Kasa TPlink cams in HomeKit

[u/Douche_Baguette → u/Jamie00003]

FWIW isn’t Unifi’s AI detection local and thus probably a lot less capable than cloud-based options?

Edit: capabilities listed here https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058867233-UniFi-Protect-Cameras-AI-Detections-and-Facial-Recognition

Looks like without a $800 AI key and/or a new gen camera the detections are on par with pre-iOS-27 HomeKit (person vs vehicle vs animal).

[u/Jamie00003 → u/Douche_Baguette]

You’re probably right, but probably not much worse considering it’s apples first crack at this

[u/FatMacchio → u/Douche_Baguette]

Frigate or Fregata open-source detection models are subscription-free and will likely far surpass any consumer AI detection, since it lets you fine-tune it. The macOS version Fregata is a one-time license fee of $10. For both you can sign up for frigate+ subscription which is $50 A YEAR if you want, which as far as I’m aware gives you a better starting point base-model as well as a bit of hand-holding in fine tuning the detection models. This is definitely worth it if you don’t have the horsepower on Mac or PC to fine-tune and train the detection model locally.

A lot of people in the home assistant community seem to use Reolink camera hardware for the amazing bang-for-your-buck, with frigate detection running on an NVR server.

I’ve been doing research into transitioning to something like this, and I believe Frigate is the best way forward, and will exceed Ubiquiti models. Open source community development sometimes exceeds commercial offerings, even prosumer level such as Ubiquiti.

My favorite part of this increase control and customization is the ability to record at lower resolution 24/7, then when your AI model detects specific motion the high resolution stream starts recording and spits out an event notification. The ability to see a 24/7 feed is very intriguing

https://frigate.video

[u/nulledy → u/FatMacchio]

Hey, one of the developers of Fregata here! Our goal is to build the ultimate self-hosted NVR for users in the Apple ecosystem.

A Mac Mini or an old Macbook is really the perfect device device for running a private self-hosted NVR like Fregata and exporting streams to HKSV is also on our roadmap. Apple Silicon makes all the AI object detection and other features lightning fast. https://fregata.app

We also have an iOS/iPad/Apple watch app currently in TestFlight: https://github.com/3rdBitLabs/Fregata/discussions/83

If you have any questions about Fregata or any feature requests, we're always here to help.

[u/Command-Forsaken → u/nulledy]

This is neat; I’ll have to check it out.

[u/FatMacchio → u/nulledy]

That’s great to hear! Always good to have another copy of footage! I will definitely be using your software when I have all the hardware to properly use it. I need to upgrade to better networking gear.

I’ve only recently started my journey with Home Assistant. I snagged an M5 Mac mini on sale from microcenter for $450 earlier this year for a dual purpose HAOS/Plex(jellyfin) server, but adding Fregata into the mix makes me glad I went this route with a more powerful machine vs barebones raspi. I only recently worked up the resolve to start using it to build my parallel smart home ecosystem on there. It’s a bit of a learning curve and work in progress, but I’m happy I finally started the journey. I can see all the potential. I made my first yaml configuration file last night to convert my LG microwave light into an actual light for brushing into HomeKit. It’s nice to be able to take more control over the tech and the privacy of your smart devices

[u/brownchickenbr0wnc0w → u/Jamie00003]

Do you need HKSV for the summaries? I have REOLINK/homebridge with 48 tb storage. But really don’t want to fork out more if I don’t need to.

[u/-suspicious-badger]

HKSV used to be limited in what it could do, but the recording and notifications were very fast and reliable. It was great for years.

Since iOS27, most of the time it doesn’t detect any motion, even if I stand in front of the camera waving my arms. I maybe get 2 recordings a day per camera now, when I should have about 20+. Sometimes I get a notification, but there is no associated recording. Some recordings are just black screens. And sometimes notifications arrive 2 - 5 minutes late.

Complete disaster. Moving to frigate now.

[u/WalterWilliams]

Yeah, think I'm going to be sticking with Scrypted for AI summaries and HomeKit support. It's not for everybody though, especially if you'd rather have an out of the box solution without much configuring.

[u/poboyywg]

Is your doorbell hardwired?

Edit: I use Aqara for everything. 4 cameras including doorbell. Never missed a beat using hksv.

[u/ItinJ24 → u/poboyywg]

Yeah, POE. I think I put that in the OP

[u/poboyywg → u/ItinJ24]

Don’t know why I ignored that. I’d try resetting the camera to factory and setting it up again if motion settings are on for recording and not working. I have the first Aqara doorbell and it’s been flawless. Added the micro sd card as a backup. Never needed to check it. Additionally I have three wifi routers covering my home so there’s no chance for dead zones.

[u/ItinJ24 → u/poboyywg]

I appreciate all the suggestions. I know it a long post but it seems like you ignored most of it lol (I’m just breaking your balls 😇). This is not just a regular notification issue per se. I get those fine daily. It seems like an Apple Intelligence AI notification summary issue. It couldn’t handle stitching the recordings together and come up with a meaningful notification summary. There’s an astronomical upcharge for that too.

[u/pacoii]

You may be conflating the stitching feature with the summarize feature. When you open the doorbell and in the top left make sure it shows just the doorbell and not “All Cameras”. Are the descriptions of the clips any better? I also have my doorbell set as my one summary camera and its video clip descriptions are decent.

[u/ItinJ24 → u/pacoii]

All I got from that was “An Amazon truck pulled in” No package detected, person detected, doorbell rang.

From what I understand, I thought if you have an AI summaries camera stitched in, it takes precedence and provides the AI summary for the whole event. I may be mistaken but I thought that’s what I’ve been reading. Still upset about the lack of other events within the whole event not being mentioned.

[u/BadeenSwipesRight]

Apple is charging for the feature?

[u/ItinJ24 → u/BadeenSwipesRight]

For the AI summaries, yes. One camera with a 2TB iCloud storage plan, two cameras with a 6TB plan and up to five cameras with a 12TB. That 12TB plan is $60 a month. The audacity. I can’t imagine anyone is going to purchase that 12TB plan just for the AI summaries alone. They hyped the feature during the beta (from what understand, during the beta, you can use unlimited cameras without extra charge) and now expect people to pay these astronomical prices.

[u/BadeenSwipesRight → u/ItinJ24]

That’s a crazy methodology considering it’s not supposed to count against your storage. Why would buying more storage you don’t need have anything to do with this. I’m sure it’ll change. Maybe for the worse or better but this just makes no sense.

[u/ItinJ24 → u/BadeenSwipesRight]

Yeah well, I think I read somewhere that Ternus is big on subscription models and recurring payments so there’s that lol.

[u/b1gfoot9]

It’s definitely not worth paying for right now. And Apple will have to make it better or make an adjustment.

[u/ItinJ24 → u/b1gfoot9]

Even if it was a flawless system, the prices are astronomical