Time and Date Display on video (Timestamp)

[J_Benson]

Preface: The property management company I work for purchased 8 Arlo cameras to set up around the apartment complex I manage. 

The current system does not provide an easy way to tell the exact time a specific time that an image within a video clip was captured, nor does it provice an easy way to navigate to a specific time within a video. The only mention of an exact time is the time listed when the camera began recording each clip. To find out when a still image within the video was captured, you must mentally add up the amount of time you are into a video and the start time of the clip. Example: I want to find the time 6:32 within a video clip. The video clip states that it starts at 6:30, so I navigate two minutes into the video.

My suggestion is to either add a time and date stamp to the video recording, in an unobtrusive area of the video, perhaps customizeable to which corner it appears in. Alternatively, rather than the time slider at the bottom of the clip playback stating the time into the video clip, it displays the real time the video was taken. Current setup for video playback begins at 00:00:00 and advances to 00:02:00, if video length is set to 120 seconds. Instead, it could start at the real time the video capture was taken and continue along at real time. Example: Video starts at 06:30:27 and the slider at the bottom of the playback advances to 06:32:27.

This would aid in finding a specific time in which an event reportedly occurred, as well as serve for better evidence when assessing a charge against a tenant for littering, as you could print out a screenshot of the video with a timestamp and attach it to a document for issuing a charge. It would also aid in police investigations or as evidence when in litigation. Police often come to my office to request video footage of a certain time and date, and this would assist them. We also have a problem with illegal dumping of mattresses and furniture, in which case we would need a timestamped image to present to police.

Thank you for reading this suggestion, and I hope that a timestamp could be implemented as an optional feature for the Arlo camera system in the future. 

J. Benson,
Ullrich Real Estate

[tromlov]

Add me to the list. The option of an onscreen time stamp being absent is amateurish. Please implement this.

[mystery9]

This has been discussed for two years at least and Netgear has yet to deliver? Wow

[LittleEndian]

It would be great if the video downloads from arlo.netgear.com had a human readable time and date as the file name rather than an epoch time value that is not human readable. Effort is required on the user to convert this to a human readable time, however it would be trivial for the system to do this when offering the file up for download.

Thank you!

[m_z]

I'm using Arlo Pro and Arlo Baby. It's often unclear how much of a delay we're actually seeing - that's especially annoying with Arlo Baby, where sometimes we have < 1 second delay, and sometimes over 10 seconds.

Would be nice if there was a way to add this information to the screen as we watch it, e.g. seeing 

  07:04:52 (+ 2 seconds)

when watching with a 2-second delay.

Would also be useful in recordings to see the exact time in the recorded video.

[culser]

Please the date and time stamp to the downloaded videos on the next firmware update.

When i download the videos and play them back I need a time stamp and date stamp to show during the full course of the videos.

I am using these as evidence .. without a time and date stamped in the actually video they are useless.

For those users who don't want a time stamp ,,, the option should be able to be turned off and on.

please to be done on the next firmware update.

[TomMac]

yes in case your unaware, the Numbered file name is the date / time of the video in epoch time ( computer time )

it can be converted to human time.     https://www.epochconverter.com/

It's not what you requested, just what is at this time

[m_z]

Shocking indeed....

[SimonHart]

Time and time again I've raised the issue of video date/timestamps with Netgear and they go through the same responses every time (almost like there is a company policy on how to deal with this request):

• Firstly they obfuscate the answer or seem to deliberately misunderstand the question then
• the daft epoch date answer where they inform me that the video filename contains the epoch encoded date as if this is proof of the time and date of the video, once I point out that the requirement is for a superimposed date and time and that the filename can easily be renamed (scarey that they thought this was a reasonable response) finally I get the
• submit a request for the feature and thats as far as I get as all further enquiries are directed to that response.

Which magazine did a review of security cameras in which the Arlo system came out as a 'best buy'. Needless to say I'm in email contact pointing out this critical omission. Hopefully they will regrade the unit. 

[mystery9]

wirecutter? yea, that was a very slanted review to say the least...

[hokeysmoke]

To follow up on my post from a year ago, I've examined the hardware from the FCC filings and do not believe that the OV788 chip (which does the H.264 encoding) has the capability to produce an overlay.  It is also unlikely that the camera knows what time/date it is or what language to use in the overlay even it could produce one.  The base station, also per the FCC filings, seems to be based on a simple router and has no processing power capable of decoding the H.264, adding an overlay, then re-encoding the video prior to storage in the cloud.  So the only way I think Netgear could add this overlay would be to post-process it at their servers, similar to what you could do with access to the metadata and some simple video editing software.

I'd also like to note that even without time stamping, I was able to convict a robber when they broke into our house.  I used a simple epoch time converter (which I've posted elsewhere here) to rename the files into human readable format, and gave them to the police.  The video of the incident is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMGlDfigqDo.  This criminal would not have been caught without the Arlo cameras.