I'm gonna pop in here to leave a quick review of the Arlo Pro 2 camera system. Figured there might be some folks in here thinking about getting one.
The Arlo system is great if you fit exactly into the mold the product was designed for. You live in a detached single family home and want to keep an eye on your front and/or back doors to your home, or an area in your house (such as your kid's play room or your dog during the day while you're gone). The sleek compact design allows you to easily conceal the camera and will fit pretty much anywhere. I was surprised how long the battery seems to hold up. After 4 days of the camera being on, it's captured about 50 videos, and I've also used the live view for a few minutes at a time and the battery is at 99%.
tl;dr version of next 2 paragraphs: Don't get Arlo if you need 24/7 CVR, which it advertises it does.
If your use case strays at all from what the product was designed for, then it starts to fall apart, which is what happened with me. I live in a town home complex, with rules against mounting cameras all over the unit. I live next to someone whom I'm 95% sure is a drug dealer, he operates out of his home and does transactions in broad daylight in the parking lot. I want to capture some of this activity on camera, but because of HOA rules, I can't mount a camera on my unit with a good view of the parking lot, so it needs to be looking out of a window. Since IR can't "see" through a window, the motion activation doesn't work, so I need something which records 24/7. That's why I specifically got the Arlo Pro 2, with that camera, if you leave it plugged in, you can subscribe to the Arlo CVR feature for $10/mo and record 24/7 to the cloud.
At first, things seemed great. But then it came time to review some of the CVR footage which is where it all falls apart. You review the footage on the cloud, and the player is built with fucking Flash, so it's buggy as hell. There's no fast forward, no slow motion, you can't move frame by frame, you can't zoom in, and there is no timestamp on the video it self, just in the player timeline (which isn't 100% accurate). Without a timestamp on the video, I wonder if the footage is even usable by police. When you move around on the timeline, it might take 1 second to load the frame and play, or it might take 30 seconds... or it might not even load at all! Worst of all, if you find some footage you'd like to hang on to... YOU CAN'T DOWNLOAD ANY OF THE CVR FOOTAGE. It's locked away in the cloud, I'd need to use screen capture software on my PC to pull CVR footage to my computer. What the fuck is the point of this feature anyways?
So I'm taking the Arlo back to Best Buy, and I already bought this
Lorex Wifi camera system with local storage, just waiting for it to ship. Cameras aren't as good as the Arlos, but at least I won't have to deal with subscription and cloud bullshit with the system.
