Milestone XProtect 2. Review Network Camera Critic. Milestone, the leader in commercial NVR software came out with a new release a few weeks ago and they have made some good improvements. Milestone is one of my favorite NVR solutions and has some of the widest coverage of network cameras out there as well as very good smartphone apps and remote browser access. If you tried Milestone XProtect in the past and were frustrated by installation and configuration issues, XProtect 2. Milestone XProtect is available in multiple versions of XProtect raging from their free Go version up to their Corporate version. Im not going to explain the difference between all the version as Milestone does a much better job of it HERE. The good thing about XProtect is from the free Go version on up, the core product is the same so you can start with Go and work your way up without having to re learn a new product. For most homes and small businesses, the most popular versions are Go and Essential. Gos biggest limitations you can only have 8 cameras and 5 days of video retention. You can export video to keep a copy forever, but it will only store 5 days on its own. May seem like a big limitation but in my experience, its rare that one would review video older than a few days old. Essential adds support for up to 2. Browse In Same Window Grayed Out Blue' title='Browse In Same Window Grayed Out Blue' />I was thinking the same about the accent peices except the porch ceiling. I hadn,t though about that. It really sounds fun and suprising to go with a bold color up. MovingCoil Cartridges, with their inherently lower mass, have the most refined, accurate and transparent sound available today, and, accordingly, dominate the 3. The Handbook To Higher Consciousness here. Browse In Same Window Grayed Out Blue' title='Browse In Same Window Grayed Out Blue' />Essential costs 9. You view your cameras and recordings using one of 3 XProtect clients. The most complete is the Smart Client and runs on Windows. You are free to install the Smart Client app on as many PCs as needed. You also can use Milestone Mobile on Apple IOS devices and Android devices. Lastly, you can use the XProtect Web Client. Browse In Same Window Grayed Out Blue' title='Browse In Same Window Grayed Out Blue' />Peter 21Jan16 ToDo1 why are we talking about WDMKS in these release notes WDMKS is not in 2. See Playback and Recording below. Gale 27Jan16 I. I setup 8 cameras on XProtect and Ill start up with Smart Client. I chose a 17 layout were one camera takes up the majority of the screen and 7 are shown as smaller. There are many available layouts to suit most people. When you first log into Smart Client youll see tabs across the top for Live, Playback and Sequence Explorer. The first tab is Live which displays your cameras live. Double clicking on a camera will display it in a full window single camera view. Double click on the camera again to return to the previous multi camera view. Virtual Mirror Software. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom inout or draw a box of what you want to zoom in on, in my case the car across the street. It will then quickly zoom into that area. This applies to Live or Playback modes. You can navigate in the zoomed in window by clicking on the arrows in e PTZ control in the lower left of the image or move it around in the small window in the lower right. Clicking on the Playback tab allows you to view the recordings that have been made. You can use the same layout view as with Live or switch to a different layout view by clicking on lt Select view. Across the bottom is a timeline that shows all cameras and the selected camera that has a blue border around it. In the screen shot below, the Driveway camera is selected and it shows a red bar in the timeline for each recorded event. You can drag the timeline left or right to view more events. As you drag the timeline, it will display video for all the cameras that were active at the time. Cameras that were not active at that point in time are grayed out. By default the timeline shows a 2 hour window but in the bottom right, you can adjust the granularity, for example show a 2. To export video, click on the icon in the lower left that looks like a square with a line on each side. You can position the brackets to cover the time window you wish to export and click on Export to bring up the Export window. Here you can specify which cameras to export, file name and some options. Click Start Export to create the export files. If you selected Include XProtect Smart Client Player, it will put a player app in the directory allowing you to keep the video files in their native format and still allow someone to view them. A good use of this would be if police requested videos of 2 cameras in front of your home from 1 2. PM, you can provide them a player so that they can see what you see in Smart Client with basically the same functionality like timeline scrubbing and multi camera playback, for example, in the right window I took advantage of the ability to zoom in to the mail truck. If you open the left menu panel by clicking on the greater than size under Live you have more options. Smart Search allows you search through recorded events looking for motion using a more specific part of the image than you may have chosen for recording. Some call this a bit search. In the example below, Im having it search for a any motion in the area of the grid I cleared. Clicking Next starts the search and stops at each point in the recordings that meet the search criteria. The third tab is Sequence Explorer. Instead of the Playback timeline, this shows clips as thumbnails. You first select which cameras you want to see clips for and then click on a thumbnail to start playing it. You can control the numbersize of thumbnails and the time range with the controls at the bottom. You can also view the cameras and recordings remotely using just about any web browser including one on a Mac. This is what my 8 cameras look like after you log in. A minor difference from Smart Client is that when you double click on one camera, it displays the camera larger and shows the other cameras across the bottom. Clicking on a camera at the bottom will display it on top. Clicking on the greater than sign under the large image puts you in playback mode. Playback will display in the upper right of the image and shows the playback controls below the image. To select a start time, click on the calendar icon and it brings up a window where you can slide sort of like a timeline. You can also export videos to your local PC by clicking on the icon in the lower right that looks like a filmstrip with an up arrow. The last way to access your cameras is via Milestone Mobile. These are free apps you can install on your IOS or Android devices. I have it running on my Android phone, a Samsung Galaxy S4 and also a tablet, a Samsung Note 2 to show you what it looks like. Having a tablet nearby is handy for quickly seeing whats going outside and from my phone I can see whats going on when Im away. Im sure there are better ways to capture a screenshot but I just took a picture of my tablet to show you how it works. When you first connect it will allow you setup a location, in my case I called it Home. Tapping on All Cameras shows my 8 cameras. You can setup views to show different cameras, for example, say you have 8 outdoor cameras and 8 indoor cameras, you can create a view of the outdoor cameras and another with the indoor camera and switch between them. Looking at the phonetablet in landscape mode shows a maximum of 6 cameras. Tapping on a camera shows you that camera as large as it will fit on the screen in the proper aspect ratio. You can use pinch motions to zoom in to get more closeup detail and swipe your finger to move around the image. Tapping PLAYBACK on top puts you into playback mode. You can play fowardsbackwards, change playback speed. Clicking the clock icon provides a list of recordings to chose from. To zoom in on the video, I used a pinch motion to get detail on what type of car this is. This pretty much covers how you can view your cameras and explore recordings using Milestone XProtect. I feel the smartphone apps are some of the best Ive used and in it of itself is worth it to me.