Live view & detection delays + a couple of hub questions

[TP1980]

Got my first Arlo device (Pro 4) yesterday and got some questions for you:

1) Is motion detection recording disabled when looking at the live view? I noticed my dog came to look at the camera wondering "that hasn't been there before" but there is no clip of it. There is a clip recorded maybe 30 seconds earlier though.

2) Will there be a delay/pause between motion detection clips and if so, how long and why cannot that be changed? (See above)

3) Turning on the live view takes usually around 5 or 7 seconds - no matter how far the camera is from the router (strong wifi signal). The question is: If I buy an Arlo smart hub and use that instead of the router wifi, will that delay reduce significantly (to 1-2 seconds?). One of my $40 cameras is further away from the router and connecting to its live view only takes 2-3 seconds. Over 5 times more expensive device should be able to match that, right? 😉

4) By using an Arlo smart hub instead of normal router, is it possible to make the traffic stay in LAN only? As I'm already using VPN on my phone it doesn't make sense to send bits to Arlo's servers (which I assume are in the US) halfway around the World and suffer from the delay...

5) Will updates mess with my settings? I'm 100% sure I had disabled "audio detection" and had chosen email as the preferred MFA method but when I woke up this morning I had dozens and dozens of recorded clips based on audio detection and as I logged in first time with my Edge browser the MFA request was pushed to my app instead of the email I had chosen. Why do the updates overwrite MY selections and does this mean I will need to go through all settings after each update?

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And in case one of Arlo's staff actually reads these, here's a couple of improvement ideas too:

1) Add ip-address (or at least MAC-address) to the device info. It would make it easier to identify the devices in the LAN.

2) Increase the bitrate of the "best video" option. The bitrate seems to be ~1700kbps. How about at least doubling it? The image quality gets really awful (pixelated) at times. One of my other cameras (different brand) uses bitrate of ~5000kbps and NEVER pixelates.

3) "Mute notifications" should have something in between the 3h and 24h. I think 8h or 12h would be perfect.

4) Playback speed of recordings should be selectable. Most of the other cameras I have have option to see videos in 1x, 2x, 4x etc. speed.

5) Filenames and timestamps. It's absolutely insane that Arlo doesn't give the option to show/hide timestamps on videos! We're talking about security videos after all. What's a security video without the timestamp? Also the filenames are random. It should be a 5 minute task even for a n00b programmer to change the filenames to timestamps (e.g. "2021-11-17T153046.mp4"). I bet it's trickier to get random filenames instead of using timestamps...

[StephenB]

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@TP1980 wrote:

5) Also the filenames are random. 

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Actually they are the epoch time that the video was recorded, so not random.  The metadata in the file does show the time the video was taken, but most players don't show it.  Alternatively, enter the file name here: https://www.epochconverter.com/

FWIW, I agree that Arlo should name the videos with a name that includes a human-readable time.

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@TP1980 wrote:

2) Increase the bitrate of the "best video" option. The bitrate seems to be ~1700kbps. How about at least doubling it? The image quality gets really awful (pixelated) at times. One of my other cameras (different brand) uses bitrate of ~5000kbps and NEVER pixelates.

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Fully agree.  

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@TP1980 wrote:

5) Will updates mess with my settings? 

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No.

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@TP1980 wrote:

4) By using an Arlo smart hub instead of normal router, is it possible to make the traffic stay in LAN only? As I'm already using VPN on my phone it doesn't make sense to send bits to Arlo's servers (which I assume are in the US) halfway around the World and suffer from the delay...

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No.  It is built as a cloud service.  Though some traffic (livestreaming) will stay on the local LAN if possible.

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@TP1980 wrote:

3) Turning on the live view takes usually around 5 or 7 seconds - no matter how far the camera is from the router (strong wifi signal). The question is: If I buy an Arlo smart hub and use that instead of the router wifi, will that delay reduce significantly (to 1-2 seconds?). 

In my experience, the delay isn't improved with a smarthub.  I'd like to see faster connection times as well.  This might be a power tradeoff, not sure.

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@TP1980 wrote:

1) Is motion detection recording disabled when looking at the live view? 

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Yes.

[TP1980]

OK. Thanks for the answers. Although one thing "bothers" me... IMO the hub is supposed to replace the cloud thing so I think it should be possible to limit the traffic to LAN (excluding the alerts sent to the app). So live view, recordings etc. should go directly from camera to hub and from hub to app/browser (within the same LAN).

But I do recognize the "need" for Arlo to sell their cloud subscriptions and therefore not giving everything to the security-aware (or paranoid) people. 😄

[StephenB]

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@TP1980 wrote:

Although one thing "bothers" me... IMO the hub is supposed to replace the cloud thing so I think it should be possible to limit the traffic to LAN (excluding the alerts sent to the app). So live view, recordings etc. should go directly from camera to hub and from hub to app/browser (within the same LAN).

Arlo never intended the hub to replace the cloud - their original solution used a local hub to connect the cameras to the cloud.  The hub WiFi is tuned to optimize power use in the cameras.  With newer cameras, the hub is optional - likely to bring total cost down.

As I said before, live streaming will stay on the local LAN if you are home, and that will happen both with and without a hub.

FWIW, I think Arlo should use the hubs for more stuff.  Many users have internet data caps, so using the smarthub storage to cache the cloud library would be good.

Smarthubs (VMB4540 and VMB5000) allow direct access to local storage from the app, but not from the PC browser.  There are several other restrictions.  But access to the cloud library always uses a connection to the cloud, the hub is not used for caching.

[dcfox1]

Even though the date and time is embedded in the file I am surprised that there is still no timestamp on the actual video. Try explaining Metadata to a Jury.