EyeSoft

EyeSoft is a network IP surveillance software application whose purpose is to help you monitor multiple locations via webcams. It supports both audio and video sources, and works with USB webcams, PCI/PCI-E video capture cards, hardware compression cards, IP cameras, Windows Media streams, local video files and remote connections to another EyeSoft tool.

The GUI looks clean and well organized but it cannot be described as intuitive and easy to work with. You need to consult the help manual in order to get an idea about how this program works. You may also rely on tooltips for viewing short descriptions of the utility’s features.

You are allowed to monitor up to 64 cameras and preview the audio and video streams in real time, playback data, and detach a window from the main panel and move it anywhere on the screen (useful for multiple monitors).

You may reset the alarm indicator, run a channel and control a PTZ camera, manually start or stop the recording, start or stop the built-in scheduler, play or stop the audio preview for the main channel or all channels, as well as view indicators about the storage capacity (health, low or empty) and active or inactive status of Windows Media Broadcast, Eyesoft video server, and HTTP web server.

You may run or stop all channels, activate a certain channel group (useful for the surveillance of multiple monitors), arrange channels by dragging and dropping them on the preview videos, as well as switch to the preview tab automatically at a certain time interval. You may zoom in or out of video streams.

The tool lets you select the capture card and input port or webcam you want to connect to. You may pick the video standard, pixel format, resolution and frame rate.

The motion detection feature can be used for automatically triggering an alarm when movement is detected within a certain area. You may create an unlimited number of detectors for a channel, each detector with its own masked area, sensitivity and tag.

EyeSoft allows you to record streams, search for channels, access recorded videos within a 24-hour timeline and date control, index media files, look for broken media file links, and export the settings to a file so you can import them in the future.

You may schedule the entire process, stream media to Internet over TCP/IP protocol, connect remotely with IE, set up HTTP and video server for remote viewing, check out logs, organize your cameras and devices into a map view, collect information and reveal statistics with the aid of graphs, set up alarms (sound or colorful popup notifications), and send email alerts upon various events.

There’s no doubt EyeSoft comes with a comprehensive suite of features for helping you strengthen your video and audio surveillance system. However, the layout is not intuitive so the learning curve is difficult and you may need extra time in order to understand its features.