Hey YouTube, I'm Tristan from
Smart Home Point.
You know in the movies where you've got
security guards sitting in a security
box somewhere, and they're looking at a
screen
full of CCTV images - live feeds - of their
CCTV cameras? And then Ethan Hunt or
James Bond comes in and knocks them out,
and disables the CCTV cameras? well I'm
not going to show you how to knock
people out, but I wanted to do this video
and show you whether or not
with your Ring cameras you're able to
actually get a TV screen or PC monitor
and look at the actual individual camera
feeds that are available?
interesting question... no, no you can't, no,
not possible. Wait you... you can't?!
What do you mean?! Well I gotta film a
YouTube video, I gotta give them
something!
Okay well as it turns out from my much
more intelligent assistant over there,
it's not actually possible to - on a
particular monitor - look at all the
live feeds of all your different Ring
devices, but worry not.
What you can actually do is use the
snapshot capture feature
and then you can log into your Ring
dashboard and you can actually view all
the feeds
there on a single place, and I wanted to
film this video and talk through how you
can do this.
Whilst it's not quite as good obviously
as viewing all the live feeds,
snapshot capture images get refreshed
every 30 seconds, so at least you can get
a decent enough snapshot of what's
happening in all parts of your property
without having to go out and spend a
small fortune on professional quality
security cameras.
Okay so for snapshot capture, um it's
not
activated by default, um at least it
wasn't to my
Ring Doorbell Pro or my Ring Indoor Cam,
so what you need to do is go into each device,
go to the settings up there,
just go down to device settings, and then
you've got this snapshot
capture feature. It was rolled out I think
end of 2019 I believe, or start of 2020,
so all your devices should have it now.
Uhm and basically what this does is it
captures images regularly to show what
happens between detected events.
So in other words, it fills in your
timeline um,
which is quite a handy feature. So in
between your motion events and your full
recordings you've actually got...
get this... slightly lower res snapshot
capture that's taken.
So to turn it on, obviously just click
the toggle and then
you can choose how frequent you actually
want this snapshot -
Uhm, this still image - to be taken. You
can do every three minutes,
I tend to do every 30 seconds. Uhm, you do
get a warning with 30 seconds just
saying it can slow down your timeline.
There you are see, that's the warning. Uhm to be
honest, my timeline is fine even with
this 30 seconds on.
Uhm, your mileage may vary but just try it
out.
I think for me personally, especially
since you know I'm doing this video on
the - sort of -
security camera dashboard, it makes sense
to do every 30 seconds because it'll fill
in my timeline a lot better.
But if you do find things get slower,
then just do every one minute instead or
even every three minutes.
Uhm and how this actually works is if you
look your event history
for a particular device... no sorry not my
event history... if I look at my timeline,
I've got all my motion events but then
between - so that's an actual motion... then
I think that's actually me isn't it!
Anyway, whatever, in between a motion
event
you've got all these still images.
Okay so every 30 seconds it's taking a
snapshot capture and it's just filling
things in
between the motion event, and obviously
you can see that -
you know - it's not ideal because you know
you see a car there and then it disappears
quite quickly.
But to be honest, it's better than
nothing and certainly a still image
every 30 seconds - especially if you've
got more than one Ring device - will
actually allow you to see some
crime or just other things going on in
your neighborhood. It's a lot better than
literally having motion events and
nothing else.
Uhm yes it's detected some people go past. So
it's quite a nice feature. So what I'd say is
just make sure for any of your Ring
devices,
go into your device settings, and just
make sure you've got snapshot capture
turned on.
Make sure it's at the frequency you want
it on,
and then just like you can view your
dashboard here on the Ring app, you can
also do the same on a laptop.
Let's have a look at that now. So in
terms of how you actually do this, the
first thing you need to do is just get a
laptop
and plug it in to a PC monitor, or you
could use a Raspberry Pi
or media TV or any device. But anything
that'll - sort of -
plug in to a PC monitor. and then you
need to go to
Ring.com. Okay so first thing to do
is log into your account on a computer -
or whether it's a tablet - you know, just
on a web browser of some sort,
just like you do with the Ring app. And
you firstly come here.
So we'll go off that and just go to my
account instead.
what you do when it finally loads - it's a
bit slow - is you can see you've got your
protect plan
stuff up here, but down here you've
actually got your devices and you can
see the snapshot captures there,
and you can see that they've refreshed
quite recently. Uhm
obviously there's a lot of white space
here, so if I was setting this up on the
TV monitor
somewhere in my house, what I'd probably
do is zoom in a few times.
Let's have a look... zoom in a few times...
just get rid of some of the white space,
and then you know so make sure it's
comfortable for all the different
devices I've got.
I've only got two, in which case I can
just zoom in quite a lot. If you've got
more you might want to zoom out a
little bit, or maybe not zoom out at all.
Or zoom in at all, rather.
But as you can see you've got the
individual snapshot captures here,
and it's a really good way of just
having it up on one screen
and seeing exactly what's happening
around your property. Obviously as I
mentioned in the intro, this isn't as
good as some professional
level security system that actually
has all the real-time feeds on a
security monitor somewhere,
but this is at least good enough,
especially for a smart product.
It's a good enough way of seeing roughly
what's happening in your property.
Some websites will automatically log you
out if you're inactive for a certain
amount of time,
um so I want... and obviously if you were
being automatically logged out of this
Ring dashboard after a certain amount of
time,
then this whole video wouldn't really
make sense because
obviously a security dashboard - or
security monitor - which keeps logging you
out wouldn't be very useful!
So what I did is first thing this
morning - well quarter past eight -
I set up a... I logged into the Ring
website and I set up a
device - a bit software - that just takes a
screenshot every
second or every minute, sorry. Uhm,
so it starts at quarter past eight,
and first you can see the... the images,
the screenshot captures, are changing
which is good so it shows this method
works.
The other thing you can see is I'm never
logged out. I'm just literally cycling
through
the images that have been taken, the
snapshots here. I think at this point I
was messing around
manually, that's why it's zoomed back up.
But yeah, later on you can see I'm still
not logged out, you can see the images
are changing so everything's good.
Uhm, and to be honest I've just left this
running, so it's now quarter past eleven
I still haven't been logged out of my
account, so it's pretty safe to assume
that Ring
don't have any - sort of - automatic log out
system setup, because if they did it would
take effect after
a few minutes - certainly not after three
or more hours.
Uhm, but if you do find in the future Ring
are automatically logging you out,
what you could do is go to Chrome or
Firefox and install an auto refresh
extension.
There's loads of them out there. I've got one -
it's called super easy auto refresh -
and what you can do is choose the
polling interview for how often you want
this web page to refresh.
So if I say every five seconds, what'll
actually happen
is I can go away, leave this um monitor
here, and every five seconds it'll just
come along and refresh,
and it'll scroll me back down to where I
was before, um which is good.
Uhm, obviously every five seconds is a bit
too frequent so I'll just
fix that a second... I set it to every
one minute,
even though my snapshot captures are set
for every 30 seconds, I'll just
do every minute. So this is quite
useful because this actually simulates
activity, so if in the future
Ring does bring out automatic log out,
then the plugin - such as an auto refresh
plugin - will actually simulate activity
and stop you getting automatically logged
out.
The other benefit is if... although I've
noticed...
although my screenshot captures are
updating perfectly well,
as we've just seen from looking at this,
we can see that they're changing really
well.
If at some point that's not the case and
they're not refreshing for whatever
reason on the website,
then by using an auto refresh
extension, you know that it'll always resync
from fresh, so
it could be worth doing this even if
Ring doesn't have an auto...
an auto log out in the future. But right
now everything seems good!
This method works well based on my
testing - I've been logged in for over
three hours,
so this could work really well as a
makeshift security monitor.
Okay thanks for watching this video
about how to view all your Ring cameras
from a single place.
I hope you found it useful. If you did,
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don't forget to subscribe.
Thank you!