Skip to content
motiondetection

CCTV video analytics software for ONVIF and RTSP systems

Most CCTV estates were installed once and then left alone, which is exactly right: the cameras still work. What has moved on in ten years is the software that reads them, and that part you can change without a scaffold tower.
Run it on a clip
  • Works with hybrid DVRs
  • No rip and replace
  • Published price per camera

Interior, after hours

Fixed camera, low light, two subjects

00:00.0

Clip

Decoded in your browser. Your video is never uploaded.

6

Sets the luma delta threshold and the smallest region that counts.

0.4s

Kills the one frame flicker that no operator wants paged about.

Exclude zone

Put it over the road, the tree, the neighbour's window. Events inside it stop alerting.

The frame an event was found on shows up here.

00 00:00.0

Nothing selected yet

Hover a row in the event table to preview its frame, click it to hold the frame and jump the clip there.

Length
0.0s
Confidence
0%
Area
0.0%

0

Motion events found

0

Dropped by zone

0

Dropped, too short

0

Alerts you would get

# Start Length Class Conf. Area

Reading the clip. Events appear here as they are found.

01 The estate as it actually is

A typical site is three generations of camera and one recorder that ties them together.

Surveillance video analysis software has to meet that estate where it is, or it is a hardware project wearing a software price.

What is on the wall How it connects here
IP cameras on a modern NVR Straight through. Take the RTSP URL per camera, or discover them over ONVIF, and use the sub stream for detection.
Analogue cameras on a hybrid DVR Through the recorder. If the DVR publishes an RTSP channel per camera, which most made in the last decade do, the camera age stops mattering.
A mix of brands from three installs Normal, and fine. Each camera is a stream URL, so nothing has to match anything else.
Cameras with no useful night image The honest no. If a human cannot tell what is in the frame, neither can the model. Fix the illumination first, it is cheaper than any software.
Cloud only consumer cameras The other honest no. A camera that only talks to its own app publishes nothing for anything else to read.

Why the recorder stays

Your DVR or NVR keeps doing the job it is good at: continuous recording, local storage, retention. We do not replace it, we do not want your footage, and nothing here changes where your video lives.

What changes is what happens when something moves. Instead of the recorder deciding by pixel count, the frames get classified and you get an event with a class, a duration and a confidence value.

Getting the stream URL out of your recorder

02 Against the usual checklist

Video surveillance analytics software gets specified as a feature list, so here is ours against it.

Capability Here Detail
Object classification yes Person, vehicle, animal, package, other motion. Custom classes on Operate and above.
Polygon exclude zones yes Unlimited on Operate and above, two per camera on Watch.
Minimum duration filtering yes 0.2 to 5 seconds. The highest value setting in the product.
Event timeline and search yes Class, time, duration, confidence and motion area per event, filterable and exportable.
Per class alert routing yes Email on Watch, plus webhook and Slack on Operate, plus schedules and escalation on Multi-Site.
SSO, roles, audit log yes, by tier Roles on Operate, SSO with SAML and OIDC plus a one year audit log on Multi-Site.
Live stream ingestion by email today The demo runs on uploaded and bundled clips. Connecting your live stream is what we send you steps for, and we are not going to describe it as finished self serve when it is not.
Video storage and retention no We hold events, not footage. Your recorder keeps doing that, which is what it is for.
Face recognition no, by design No face templates, no re identification. This is a product decision and it is permanent.
Licence plate recognition no Vehicles are classified as vehicles. Plates are not read.

Three of those rows are a no. A specification sheet with no noes in it has been written by marketing, and you already know that, which is why they are in the same table as the yeses rather than in a footnote.

03 Retrofitting an existing estate

Start with two cameras, not with twenty.

  1. Pick your two worst cameras. The one that alerts all night and the one you always end up scrubbing after an incident. If it works on those two, it works.
  2. Export a clip from each at the worst hour. Sixty seconds is plenty. Put both through the demo and read the timelines.
  3. Draw the zones you would actually draw. The road, the footpath, the neighbouring unit, the bay that belongs to somebody else.
  4. Set the duration floor. One and a half seconds removes most weather and flex on a typical outdoor camera.
  5. Then widen to the rest of the estate. Cameras pointing at similar scenes reuse the same settings, so camera three onwards takes minutes rather than hours.

What tends to break first, by site

Retail and hospitality

Reflections in glass frontage, and the pavement outside the door.

Industrial and warehousing

Pallet wrap, flapping plastic strip curtains, and forklift lamps sweeping walls.

Storage and yards

Roller doors flexing, corrugated steel under infrared, headlights from the access road.

Residential and mixed use

A public footpath in frame, and the neighbour's driveway.

All four are the same underlying physics, written out in why security cameras send false triggers.

04 Asked about CCTV analytics

What an installer or an IT lead asks first.

01

Do we have to change the recorder?

No. Continuous recording, storage and retention stay exactly where they are. This reads streams and produces events, and it never asks to own your video.

02

How much upstream bandwidth does it need?

Detection uses a sub stream rather than the full resolution feed, which is a fraction of the bandwidth of cloud recording. Only cropped keyframes from detected events are sent for classification, not continuous video.

03

Our cameras are ten years old. Is that a problem?

Usually not. What matters is whether the stream is readable and whether the night image is usable, not the year on the box. A clean lens and sensible infrared placement outperform a newer camera in a bad position.

04

Can our installer set this up for us?

Yes, and for most estates that is the fastest path, because they already have the credentials and the channel map. There is nothing proprietary to learn: it is stream URLs, zones and duration thresholds.

05 Read next

Related pages for an existing estate

Video management software for IP cameras

Six VMS platforms on licence model and price, and which half of the job you already own.

RTSP software

Stream URL patterns per brand, sub streams and codecs.

AI security camera software

What adding a model to existing IP cameras involves.

Camera analytics

The event timeline, part by part.

Enterprise security camera systems

The answers a security questionnaire asks for.

Security camera analytics for parking and property

Entrances, parking and after hours access.

Video analytics software price

Per camera cost across four tiers.

Test it on the two cameras you already argue with.

Export a clip from each, run them in the demo, and read what comes back. Nothing on your estate changes until you decide it should.

Run it on a clip first