Arlo Cams coming in few weeks

Time to throw the welcoming party, yet?

Here is a pic from the ST Twitter account. Lower right corner is Arlo on display.

Yup, that’s the one that prompted me to tweet…

This MIGHT be awesome :wink:
I’ve been holding off getting cameras for 2 years as every integration is usually a mildly documented hack by a ST enthusiast (kudo’s to them all) or unsupported in one way or another over the ST spectrum.
It would be really nice if we could see stills and live feeds (record locally) from the ST app and have it show up in SmartTiles without too much magic - 5000+ lines of thread reading to get the connection up and running for the camera of you choice.

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Beware of one issue with the wireless Arlo cams. Randomly they tint the video to pink and it can’t be fixed. You have to send it in to Netgear to have it replaced (with a refurbished one). I know of this because one of mine just did this, and I started the process today. According to what I read on the Arlo community forum, this happens randomly and is a known issue.

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@cdmobile What has been your experience with Arlo, inside & outside use? I’m looking at Blink, Samsung models, and the more traditional wired setups.

“in the coming weeks”.

:rolling_eyes:

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Thanks for the heads up. How long have you had yours? I had mine over a year.

@Zatman my experience was great, I didn’t have any issues with the two I have. Both outdoor. The wire free is really convenient but it does come with two disadvantages. One you need easy access so you can change the batteries and then there is the latency. It takes me up to 20 seconds to load the live feed. I tried everything I could to improve it, with no success. Comparing to the Nest cams, which I have indoors, Arlo is pretty much useless to see who is at the door in real time. It does have 7 days of recording free, which is nice, and its motion sensor is much better than Nest.

I think it was @tyler in disguise…responding to my tweet

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I have had 4 of the Arlo’s up sense they first came out. Two are indoor and two are outdoor. I have had no issues with them at all. I can’t wait for this to happen.

I need an outside wireless security camera but don’t want to be bothered with false alarms. Does Arlo false trigger on shadows caused by clouds?

I wish I could use Blink cameras but they don’t have an outside version yet. If Arlo can work with SmartThings then I can use the Blink cameras inside and Arlo outside.

I have motion enabled all day on my front cam and never got a false alarm, but is under a covered porch, so not much cloud movement. The one on the back is on the open, but I mostly turn it on at night.

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I had purchased an Arlo Q a few months back to try out. It wasn’t bad and the Arlo family may serve as a one hit wonder for some families and homes. However, I did find my issues with it and it’s ecosystem, which led me to return the camera. Here’s my quick summary:

  1. Up until two weeks ago, they didn’t have a PoE model. Therefore you had to run this long white cable up or across walls. Definitely an eye sore.

  2. Latency, Latency. Unfortunately, similar to smartthings, to view the feed of the camera, you have to hit the Arlo cloud there is no way to locally view the video when you’re on the same network. This caused a pretty substantial delay. Forget viewing anything in realtime, that’s not happening. You’re only option is to hope the recording captured it and then do a playback. When testing, I established a live feed from the camera and did a latency test. The video feed was between 5-10 seconds behind what was actually happening.

  3. Video recordings…are spotty. Sure, when motion or audio is detected, the camera does record. You can set the length from 15sec-2min. However, there is a substanial “reset” time before it records again. When creating a motion zone, I found most of the time, it would trigger a recording when the area was active, but once the recording was done, by time it fired the recording again, the subject was walking out of the room. Therefore, from a security and monitoring perspective, you don’t get captures of what’s happening, solely when someone enters and exits. This was one of the biggest let downs for me.

  4. Quality - the video quality is decent, don’t get me wrong. However when comparing it to IP cameras and especially taking into consideration the latency and wondering “why?”, the quality didn’t meet expectations. If the quality was better then maybe that could be an “excuse” for the latency. However I found the quality to be average.

Just my experience with the Q. I’m planning to go the IP cam route, but I’m waiting just a little bit to see if Arlo improves at all since they now have a PoE version.

(Background: IT professional, Network Admin, running an Enterprise based Uniquiti network solution at home. I’ve done the performance testing and can confirm that the LAN was not the bottleneck for latency issues :slight_smile:)

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@Zatman My experience has been the same as Bobby’s. I like them, but wish the batteries lasted longer than 2-3 months (could be worse!).

I have the set of 4, for 10 months now. For a wireless HD cam they are nice, but not perfect. All 4 are outside, 3 under eves, 1 I built a custom birdhouse for.

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Cool Cam house, I nean bird. lol…What about latency, same?

I don’t know how Nest does it, but their cams are super fast. They hit the cloud too, but not once have I been hit with buffering, and the live feed loads near instantly.

1: I want to see the view.
2: Press Arlo app icon.
3: App has to sign in.
4: Scroll to desired cam, press screen.
5: Cam loads.

15-20 seconds. For motion detected, about the same.

I also have 2 Dropcam pro’s. 8 seconds.

My nest cam from hitting the app icon to live feed 4 seconds. Arlo, same process, 17 seconds (and for Arlo that is exceptional, I usualy exceed 30 seconds easy from app to live feed).

I have a much faster motion response, from motion to notification about 8 to 10 seconds.