What Can My IP Camera DO Besides Showing me Images?

Good question.

If you're not a surveillance company glued to a wall of monitors, you probably don't have time or patience to sit and watch your IP Camera 24x7. And if you watch even an hour a day, you're only monitoring about 4% of the time.

But you're in-luck (probably), because many contemporary IP camera offer tools for round-the-clock monitoring. Here are some:

1. Motion Detection (MD): Many IP cameras can detect motion, which in-turn triggers an event.  An event might be turning on a siren, or texting a photo to your phone. 

Motion-detection can be difficult to *dial-in* however, since you have to set thresholds. You have to instruct your camera how much of the image has to change, in how little a time-span, to trigger. With pets walking about, branches waving in the wind, rainstorms, too-low a threshold can produce false triggers. And too high can miss real events. 

So MD is useful but you may have to experiment to get the camera isolated from false triggers, and also experiment with thresholds.

2. FTP: your IP camera may support FTP, where an image is sent to a disk on some interval, or on a trigger like MD. Like a *poor-man's-DVR* this is essentially a slide-show view of the scene.

Some FTP systems can also transfer video clips, or even audio clips.

3. EMAIL: Your camera can email you. This service can be difficult to set up as it seems to require an SMTP(Mail Service) server, but it can be done with some config settings. If you set up your pop-client on your PC, you can probably set up this.

4. Two-way audio: You can broadcast audio TO The camera area with your cellphone or PC microphone. Why would you want to do THAT? Say Fido has been getting into your garden digging it up while you're at work? You set up MD on the garden, get an alert, look at your cell, and THERE Fido, digging. 

You get into your IP Camera phone ap, press TALK, and say GET OUT OF THERE FIDO!

FIDO looks totally confused, and wanders off.

Of course there are far more sinister activities you can intercept, such as a burgler. I'm thinking Mr Burgler hears STAY RIGHT THERE, I'M LOADING THE SHOTGUN out of the darkness, he's headed for the nearest door!

Even though all of these utilities can be very useful and even life or property-saving tools, I expect with the explosion underway we'll see even more utility of IP Camera like interfaces to social media, podcasting, etc.

Have fun!