Again not correctly recording event types

[kenzoc]

Original thread - https://community.arlo.com/t5/Arlo-Secure/Not-capturing-events-if-not-on-smart-notification/td-p/241...

As of today it's back to recording events which I haven't marked as smart notification as motion eg. When my dogs go to the side of the house, thankfully it's recorded but tagged as motion.

Like last time I can clearly see this begin occuring today after working fine in all recordings yesterday. 

[AJ-J]

Yes this has just started happening again to me too. Arlo said they rolled the changes back but my last animal recording was 1:16am Tuesday 1st October New Zealand time. I've just now been watching my dogs on live camera, and they were out all day yesterday too - but no recordings, and no vehicles either, its only recording People because that's all i want to have smart notifications for.  This is becoming super frustrating. 

[dgoldg]

Yes, there appears to be some regression. My dog, and vehicles in front of my house are being labeled as "motion."

It also looks as if Arlo is messing around with Subscription plans and features to "enhance" detection.

@JamesC , please update us on this new development. 

[JamesC]

The development team is still working to restore recording labels for events that have the Smart detection toggles turned off. While the recordings will still arrive for these events, they will have a generic motion label.

I will provide an update once I have more information from the team on this issue.

JamesC

[kayg]

As of last night my recordings are now viewed as motion when a vehicle goes by. Why does Arlo keep doing this? What if I had smart notifications turned on for vehicle to notify me and now Arlo says we’ll change it to motion and I don’t get that notification now? It’s crazy how a company can decide how the consumer gets their notifications. The consumer should be able to control this. This is a safety concern and we pay for Arlo’s service’s. At this point it may be time to look at other cameras or invest into CCTV. Please update and explain why this happening @JamesC 

[JamesC]

kayg,

The development team is continuing to work on a better solution for these labels that allows for more user customization. I will provide another update once we have more information available to share.

JamesC

[StephenB]

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@JamesC wrote:

The development team is continuing to work on a better solution for these labels that allows for more user customization. I will provide another update once we have more information available to share.

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@JamesC - one related thing I've seen is that when you schedule a recording using an automation, the Feed labels that recording as "Motion".  It'd be better if that had its own label ("Scheduled"?).  "Manual" would be better than "Motion", but I think a unique label would be better.

[srhmddx]

Mine has also now reverted back to the issue that was happing in August and September with the smart notification toggles only recording the toggled on objects.  Now I don't even have "Smart Notifications", only "Smart Detection", I don't understand how this same problem is happening AGAIN!  

[kenzoc]

I can see now animal detection is listed as a feature in plus?

As I thought this was always a money grab, garbage product and garbage practices. 

Edit : I can see my current plan (multi camera) which must be grandfathered does include all the items listed in the plus, package detection, animals etc.. so where's my services I'm paying for? I have constantly had issues with this over the many years I've used this product 

[dgoldg]

@JamesC what's the latest on this? And do the new Secure plans affect this?

[kayg]

So what's the update? Now customers have to pay more to see those detections recorded? So if we want to have vehicle and animal recordings in our plan we have to pay 17.99 or 24.99? Wow, what a bait and switch. 

[AJ-J]

My interpretation of the new ‘Plus’ features are that theyre recognition, not just alerts. Eg being able to recognise particular cars but ignore others. Whereas all cars should still be recorded without that feature but currently they are not 

[kayg]

I'm not sure what the Plus feature is, but my Arlo cameras do not identify vehicles or animals unless I turn on my smart notifications (now labeled as smart detections). Instead, those are being viewed as "motion." You can see original thread about this change. There was over 150 replies of customers upset about this new feature. 

Maybe @JamesC can elaborate on what the Plus sub is and why notifications have resorted to the previous feature that many customers disliked. 

[StephenB]

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@AJ-J wrote:

My interpretation of the new ‘Plus’ features are that theyre recognition, not just alerts. Eg being able to recognise particular cars but ignore others. Whereas all cars should still be recorded without that feature but currently they are not 

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Details on the plans and pricing do vary by country.

My interpretation for the US is that 

• Arlo Basic has monthly pricing that is the same as the old Arlo Secure, and is almost the same.  "Smart notifications" are replaced with "filtered detection", meaning you can tell the system not to alert you for people, animals, vehicles - but you will get still recordings when those are turned off.  The recordings are tagged as generic motion, and not tagged with the detected object (IMO an unfortunate change).
• Arlo Plus has monthly pricing that is the same as the old Arlo Secure Plus.  "Object Detection" looks the same as old "smart notifications".  But it adds Person Recognition in states where that is legal (identifying a specific person), and similarly Vehicle Recognition (recognizing specific cars).  Plus it adds the custom detection feature, which is something you train yourself.  The examples  on www.arlo.com include "Garage Open" and "Sprinklers On".
• Arlo Premium has monthly pricing that is the same as the old "Arlo Safe and Secure", and it appears to add the same features over "Plus" as "Safe and Secure" added over the old "Secure Plus".

[kayg]

@JamesC will Arlo resort back to changing from motion to vehicle in our feeds without having to have smart detection notifications turned on? 

[JamesC]

kayg,

I've provided the feedback presented in several threads here on the community to the management team about the generic labels for videos in feed when smart detection toggles are turned off. I do not have an ETA at this time but I will provide an update as soon as I have more information to share.

JamesC

[kayg]

@JamesC Now I noticed in my routines under Modes I used to be able to control what notifications would be sent to me for each camera when selecting send notification, I used to be able to check or uncheck notify everyone. When I uncheck notify everyone for certain cameras it removes the send notification. Now I am getting notifications for those two cameras. I have two cameras that face an alley, you can imagine how many vehicle notifications I am getting because of this now. 

How am I supposed to sleep at night with all of the notifications my phone gets because of cars driving through?  I have no idea if a car is behind my wall idling etc. or if I need to notify police because a car is loitering behind my wall, and they never get out of the car, so I won't get a person notification. I would have no idea that car was behind my wall unless I had vehicle smart detection on. 

This has become very frustrating and I spent a lot of money on Arlo cameras because I liked the product. I have nine cameras, and several solar charging panels that I invested in because the system was working very well for the past year and a half. This is completely sad, that Arlo has let down their customers, especially after the previous thread of comments. This update is not favored by the Arlo community when the last thread had over 200 replies.  @JamesC 

[JamesC]

kayg,

You can turn off "All Motion" and "Vehicles" for the desired cameras and that will suppress notifications only. The change to these toggles suppressing notifications and recordings was reversed. You should still get recordings on the cameras with toggled off Smart alerts as long as those cameras are armed, those recordings will just have a generic "motion label".

JamesC

[AJ-J]

JamesC 

When was this reversed? I’m still only getting recordings for whatever I have smart notifications enabled for, which is People. I’m not getting animals, vehicles or even ‘generic’ motion. This product is quickly becoming a waste of money, it’s simply no longer doing what it’s supposed to do. There could potentially be grounds for legal action here too as the service has changed dramatically from what people signed up for yet they’re still paying for it 

[kayg]

Any updates from management and the customers voicing their concerns? 

[JamesC]

If you're still experiencing an issue receiving recordings after testing based on my post above, I recommend that you contact customer support using the Arlo app under Settings > Support and open a ticket to further investigate the issue.

JamesC

[srhmddx]

@JamesC  so they decided to remove an ability the cameras previously had? My camera is still only recording videos for toggled-on detections.  This has been very frustrating considering the cameras have worked fine for 2 years until this summer, especially since the problem got fixed a few weeks, only to revert back!  This definitely makes me want to switch to Ring come Black Friday deals. 

[JamesC]

srhmddx,

All video should still be recorded even with Smart Detection toggles turned off. Currently, the labels for the videos will be generic "motion" labels regardless of what is actually being detected if smart notifications are turned off. This is something the dev team is still working on resolving.

JamesC

[kayg]

I agree. Since Arlo rolled out this update and now makes a generic label for motion, you'll not only have to see what that motion video is, and I've experienced that a lot of the time, it's from my trees moving or a bug flying by. 

I heard good things about Reolink, Ring, and Simplisafe. Moving forward, I will neither recommend Arlo products to anyone nor purchase them. Arlo Developers has changed this twice, even after the first time it received such negative feedback. We still don't know why there was a move to change this feature.... @JamesC 

[kenzoc]

Where's the fix? 

I don't see how rolling this change back is so hard.