Short version:

I would like to find a way to tell the camera to start on-device recording to the SD card, ideally, through a http message. An alternative would be generating a motion detection event externally.

Long version:

I am a happy owner of four 411WS cams (with 16 GB on-board SD cards) for a few years now. My only pain is that the embedded motion detection generates lots of false positives, and therefore it is not practical as a warning tool.

Recently I have put up a beefy server at home, and I am hoping to find a way to employ the more advanced motion detection algorithms available on the PC. However, I would like to record videos in the best quality possible, and my outdoor WiFi bandwidth is not enough to live stream the cameras in their highest resolution.

The current idea is that the PC performs detection on the low-res stream. If it sees something suspicious, it asks he cameras to start recording. The cameras can later upload the generated high-res clips asynchronously via FTP. Then I can turn off motion detection on the cameras, and presto, practically replaced the cam's built-in motion detection with the PC's better software.

For this to be viable, I need a way to trigger the on-camera recording via http or something else from the server. Sound like a truly simple feature, but unfortunately, the web interface of the cams seems like missing this option. The Windows Reolink client has a "capturing" functionality, but apparently, it saves the hi-res live video stream as transmitted from the camera - for which the bandwidth is not enough, and the clips skip a lot of frames.

The most straightforward solution is to reduce the quality of the high-res video stream until it can be captured on the PC, but this is not really elegant. It is also clearly possible to configure the motion detection masks and sensitivity via web, so in theory, a hack can be done where a cleared mo-det mask with low sens is replaced with a full mask of high sens when the request is made, then set back afterwards. But this is beyond ugly, and it would likely introduce a massive delay.

So is there a way to trigger on-camera recording externally? If the end of the recording could be specified in a second message, it is even better. I have found the 1.61 CGI command list, but it has no call that does this. Could not find anything on the forums either.

I have found it here:

https://reolink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Reolink-CGI-command-v1.61.pdf

I did not test the FTP server yet, but your research suggests that it may not fit my purpose. However, this document just happen to explain how to list and download in-camera recorded files, so a server process should be able to pull them actively as they appear without FTP.

Another way of circumventing the lack of trigger could be to configure the most sensitive motion detection possible on the cams, then pull the files with the mechanism above if motion is detected on the server. But that would make the cams work hard for nothing, resulting in high power consumption, and likely earlier failure.

Short version:

I would like to find a way to tell the camera to start on-device recording to the SD card, ideally, through a http message. An alternative would be generating a motion detection event externally.

Long version:

I am a happy owner of four 411WS cams (with 16 GB on-board SD cards) for a few years now. My only pain is that the embedded motion detection generates lots of false positives, and therefore it is not practical as a warning tool.

Recently I have put up a beefy server at home, and I am hoping to find a way to employ the more advanced motion detection algorithms available on the PC. However, I would like to record videos in the best quality possible, and my outdoor WiFi bandwidth is not enough to live stream the cameras in their highest resolution.

The current idea is that the PC performs detection on the low-res stream. If it sees something suspicious, it asks he cameras to start recording. The cameras can later upload the generated high-res clips asynchronously via FTP. Then I can turn off motion detection on the cameras, and presto, practically replaced the cam's built-in motion detection with the PC's better software.

For this to be viable, I need a way to trigger the on-camera recording via http or something else from the server. Sound like a truly simple feature, but unfortunately, the web interface of the cams seems like missing this option. The Windows Reolink client has a "capturing" functionality, but apparently, it saves the hi-res live video stream as transmitted from the camera - for which the bandwidth is not enough, and the clips skip a lot of frames.

The most straightforward solution is to reduce the quality of the high-res video stream until it can be captured on the PC, but this is not really elegant. It is also clearly possible to configure the motion detection masks and sensitivity via web, so in theory, a hack can be done where a cleared mo-det mask with low sens is replaced with a full mask of high sens when the request is made, then set back afterwards. But this is beyond ugly, and it would likely introduce a massive delay.

So is there a way to trigger on-camera recording externally? If the end of the recording could be specified in a second message, it is even better. I have found the 1.61 CGI command list, but it has no call that does this. Could not find anything on the forums either.