Arlo Q occasionally missing recording or motion detection not triggering

[es2]

Hi folks - 

I have my Arlo Q sitting in the kitchen window, facing out the front of my house.  My front door is a few feet away, on the same wall.  The camera is set up to capture the sidewalk and street out front, I can see anyone walking or driving by.  The motion trigger works great, we have a busy street and I get a couple hundred clips a day.

Except we occasionally have a missing clip, or the motion trigger failed, for something that should obviously be captured.  For example, we have a clip of someone who knocked on our door as they left our doorway but not when they're walking to the door.  I also saw a clip where there was no car parked directly in front of our house, but the next clip a few minutes later shows a car parked there (no movement from the parked car, the 2nd video was triggered by another object moving into frame).  

This shouldn't be a sensitivity issue as in both these cases the objects are large and obviously moved through the middle of the frame (my motion detection is not limited to any parts of the frame, it's the full frame).  The motion detection catches many things that are less obvious.

The clips we have are short, about 20 seconds as pedestrians/cars walk by, and I often see more than one recording even within the same minute... so I don't think it's a bandwidth or buffering or triggering issue with too many occurrences.

Any ideas what might be the problem?  It's annoying as we only needed the recordings a couple of times and in both cases we're missing data... while it seems to be catching everything else.

Re: buffering, what's the Arlo Q's behavior if it has a recording buffered but not fully uploaded yet?  Will it buffer multiple videos and upload all at once?  Or is there some condition which would cause a recording to get dropped?

Thanks!

[jguerdat]

The only thinng I can think of is an event occuring too soon after a previous event although that may not be your case. The camera has to complete uploading the video (it's not bufered) and then reset.  I haven't tried to measure the reset time of a Q - perhaps someone else has and will post the results.

Short videos and less resolution will create smaller videos that upload faster but your 20 second videos pretty much fall into that category. How big is your typical video? WHat is your upload speed?

[es2]

Thanks for the input.  Interesting that it doesn't buffer... with a 300 s max clip size I'd think the camera should be able to queue multiple clips at least up to that size.  

It looks like the ~20 s clips are only about 2 MB in size.  I have something like 6 Mbps uplink, maybe more.  If indeed no recording can occur during upload, then you might be right since there'd always be some window where recording isn't possible.  Lame... I wonder if this is a HW or SW limitation.  

I went ahead and cranked up the motion trigger sensitivity from 3 to 1 just in case, though I don't see how it could have missed a car parking in the center of the frame.  If we keep having this problem I may need to look at paying for continuous recording or looking at another solution that doesn't have this problem.

[jguerdat]

If you really changed sensitivity from 3 to 1, you went the wrong way. Increasing sensitivity means higher numbers, not lower. Some folks have been confused by the icons which try to show slower motion being detected at the higher numbers.

[es2]

Really?  Ok, you may have solved the issue then.  I set it to 7 and we'll see how that works.  

The icon on the left side of the slider, on the "1" side, is a stick figure standing still.  The icon on the right side of the slider, on the "10" side, is a running man in motion.  Doesn't really make sense that the figure that's standing still signifies lower sensitivity...

Thanks for your help.