BI Feature Requests anywhere ?

[StratRider]

Being a huge fan of PTZ cams, there is one feature missing that would improve it for all PTZ users.
I cannot find the feature of being able to point and click on a part of the monitor and have the camera move to that location.
Because of this item alone - I am forced to also use Surveillance Pro on another computer at the same time to accomplish my needs.
Presets are nice but when I need to quickly zoom in on something that is not dead center of the screen - too much manipulation of camera direction is required and sometimes I can miss the item altogether.
I had mentioned this to Ken on his own forum several times after searching here but so far I've not found this control in BI.
If I have overlooked this somehow, please show me where to find it - otherwise I would like to know if there is a thread or somewhere else where "Feature Requests" should be make that might actually be read and considered by Ken.
Thanks

 

[looney2ns]

Being a huge fan of PTZ cams, there is one feature missing that would improve it for all PTZ users.
I cannot find the feature of being able to point and click on a part of the monitor and have the camera move to that location.
Because of this item alone - I am forced to also use Surveillance Pro on another computer at the same time to accomplish my needs.
Presets are nice but when I need to quickly zoom in on something that is not dead center of the screen - too much manipulation of camera direction is required and sometimes I can miss the item altogether.
I had mentioned this to Ken on his own forum several times after searching here but so far I've not found this control in BI.
If I have overlooked this somehow, please show me where to find it - otherwise I would like to know if there is a thread or somewhere else where "Feature Requests" should be make that might actually be read and considered by Ken.
Thanks

It's already there, has been for a while.
Be sure to read the BI help file, I don't recall exactly where that is set.
Only way to submit requests to Ken, is to email support as per the instructions in the help file.
He does not visit here.
You can also set keyboard shortcuts for most any action...again, see the help file.

 

[StratRider]

page 38 discusses PTZ control and also has a screenshot of a menu. Page 39 says to choose "Select PTZ w/mouse cursor" to do exactly what I am asking about and also says this only works in full screen or solo cam mode.
However, my very current BI has altered the menu and "Select PTZ w/mouse cursor" has been replaced with a drop down menu with 3 options (which I just tested all of them) and none will do the "click to recenter the cam"
In full screen mode I do get extra arrows on the screen to move the monitor but only get + & - ability in the middle area - not a "center the cam here" option.
If anyone is successful in getting the right combination of adjustments for this feature, I would be very grateful for further guidance.

 

[bp2008]

What he's asking for is "relative PTZ" control where you click the video somewhere to recenter on that point. Typically such features let you draw a box by clicking and dragging down and to the right, and the camera will also zoom appropriately to try to best fit that box inside your field of view. Dragging any other direction (e.g. up or left) would reverse the zoom direction so the camera zooms out.

That feature isn't available in Blue Iris. There's every possibility Ken won't have time to implement it. Or that he might not understand fully how it is supposed to work, and implement it incorrectly or only partially.

I agree, traditional PTZ camera controls are awful. I'm sure it was different back in the day if you were using an analog PTZ with a joystick that was perfectly responsive. But with IP cameras today, the video delay and awful controls make operating a PTZ a very unpleasant experience in my opinion. Relative PTZ controls as described above can be a major improvement.

I hate stock PTZ controls enough that I've spent frankly ridiculous amounts of time hacking better PTZ controls into the camera interfaces I use, and eventually even embedding such controls into UI2 and UI3 as extensions to the base UI.



Using my UI extension, I can use the middle mouse button to do relative PTZ control exactly as I described in my first paragraph. Below the video is a panoramic snapshot (painstakingly captured and stitched using Microsoft ICE) which shows the camera's approximate frame position and size. I can also click on the panorama to reposition the camera, and use the mouse wheel on the panorama to zoom in and out.

Unfortunately, it is far too complex to set up, such that I've never been able to release this as a publicly usable tool. It is mainly complex because of the panorama. There's no reason that Blue Iris couldn't at least do the relative positioning part and expose an API to UI3 and mobile apps.

I think some really high-end PTZs support this kind of thing natively by combining the PTZ with a multi-sensor panoramic camera.

 

[StratRider]

nailed it BP - thanks for that response - I'll stop thinking I missed it now (even though the Help file eludes to it)
I don't think it is beyond Ken's ability since ASP does it easily. More likely it is just not high on his priority list. [[ just thought he might want to be better than them ]]
In the mean time, I'll just keep ASP running on a different machine on the home network and control cams the way I like from there - it's not that inconvenient and doesn't seem to interfere with my stand alone BI machine.
Thanks for the responses.

 

[bp2008]

I think Blue Iris used to have relative PTZ controls long ago, but it wasn't done intuitively and didn't work for the overwhelming majority of cameras. There used to be a big button left of the PTZ controls that looked like a grid; I think that was supposed to do relative PTZ based on where you clicked on it? But it has been gone for years.