Limiting

I would give the actual cameras five stars for ease of set up. You cant get much easier than plugging them into an outlet, installing the software itself. I was up and running in no time. The real hassle came with this software, however. I wanted to save the video to a dedicated drive. However, the software is quite hobbled under 10.6.8. You literally cannot define a hard drive to save the video to. It defaults to your home folder, and places the downloaded video from the cameras in your Movies folder there. This is just unacceptable. Especially when the files for just a day and a half of use already totals 2.85 GB!

Apparently, if the software is run under OS 10.7, you can designate a different location to store the files. I prefer to continue using OS 10.6.8 and it is just sloppy for them to create a program this hobbled. It is unacceptable. Otherwise, the software seems fairly stable under 10.6.8. I have not run it extensively under 10.7; only doing so long enough to see that it had the capacity to save movies to a dedicated drive under that OS.

I called Tech Support twice. Neither of the technicians seemed to be aware of this problem, even though it is documented on their help site. I was able to find it there while I was on the phone (on hold) during my second call (on my own after some extensive searching). You would think the technicans would have been able to tell me about the programs documented flaw immediately (they seemed to be utterly unaware of it, resulting in about three hours of wasted time on my behalf troubleshooting the software thinking something was wrong with my system). The first call was to an english speaking technican. The second, clearly was to an outsourced facility where, while the technican spoke english well enough, he certainly didnt understand it very well.

The program would be better served by having different controls for night time for brightness and contrast, and for day time. Apparently, if you change these settings, it affects daytime and night settings the same, which is ridiculous, as CLEARLY the lighting is DIFFERENT resulting in brightness and contrast settings needing to be so as well.

While it does have pop out windows, the main program remains open. And if the program is minimized to the dock, it seems to freeze the frame.

It does appear fairly stable, is easy to set up and use. You can set alerts that are emailed to you if the cameras detect any activity and you can designate zones for the camera to be attentive to to minimize areas that prompt recording. Scrubbing through the recorded video is fairly easy as well, and you can access the video file from the timeline through a drop down menu. However, it is absolutely beyond me why the recorded video does not have a time stamp.

Overall, it is quite basic. I would very much like to access non-proprietary software for these cameras however that would offer a few more controls and would permit saving of the video files to a dedicated drive.

Rhamiel about Alert Commander