Huge web timeline update!

You’re probably wondering what we’ve been up to the past few months. Well, we’ve got something huge to show you. We’ve been very busy focused on a big feature we call “Searchability”. The “Searchability” feature is all about helping you find something as quick as possible. In other words, when you have some sort of incident such as a theft you want to find that as quick as possible.

Overall the timeline looks pretty similar but it’s been completely redesigned from the ground up. Here are some of the themes and the corresponding details:

1. Help me find my stuff
2. Out with the old and in with the new
3. Faster than a speeding bullet

Help me find my stuff

Nothing is worse than spending your time trying to find a specific incident. Consider a couple examples:

• Someone stole my car! – This was pretty easy to find with the existing timeline.  Keep clicking back until you don’t see the car anymore. Then it’s easy to narrow down the exact time of the incident.
• Someone stole money out of the register but the time frame is unknown. That’s where it gets difficult. Now you have to monitor all the places where someone was at the register and try to find the date and time.

For the cash register case, this is very difficult to quickly narrow down. If you audited the cash several days later then you might have hours and hours of video to go through. That’s where the new timeline will help. Some of the items we addressed.

1. Scrubber consistency – That red line marking where you are in the timeline is your friend. It lets you know the time you are reviewing and you can drag and drop the scrubber to start playing at that time. Alternatively simply clicking anywhere and the video will play.
2. Next and previous – Nothing new here other than accuracy and consistency improvements. You should always start by reviewing video by clicking a date/time then use your next/previous buttons to jump through motion events.
3. New skip forward/back buttons. See image. Use these buttons while you review any video to quickly jump through 15 secs forward or back to narrow down the specific incident.

Skip forward/back 15 secs:

Out with the old and in with the new

There are two big changes here.

1. Quick download. Now with a simple hover over any event will have a “quick download link”. See image. Click the “Download this event”, it will highlight that event only. Feel free to extend the time or simply download that event. It will create a download available in the settings page. We used to have a quick download available in the player itself but that is now gone. It was inaccurate and hard to narrow down the correct file to download without playing the video first.
2. No more Flash! As many of you know Flash is officially end of life this year. We haven’t actually used Flash as the default for a very long time, however we had to maintain Flash due to our support of MJPEG cameras. With this new timeline release MJPEG will continue to be supported even though Flash is gone.

Quick Download:

Faster than a speeding bullet

As mentioned this has been redesigned from the ground up. What we’ve done is completely change our data model and make sure that we can retrieve data faster than ever seen before.  Not only that, the caching strategies in place improve the experience tremendously. What’s more annoying than having to wait to load something. Once you click on something to play it will now load all other media in the view. You get near instant playback no matter where you click in your view.

The entire focus at this point has been on the web app but expect to see this soon for mobile. It doesn’t end here, now that the infrastructure is in place, you’ll start seeing some very cool features. Make sure to sign up to get notifications of what’s coming.

This is rolling out slowly for users and will eventually be enabled for everyone. We’d love to hear your feedback. What else would you like to see with the new timeline?