Sightwise Help

Manuals for everything in Sightwise — the live grid, playback, exporting clips, cameras, users, multi-server sites, the hub, alerts, and the mobile app. Use the search box on the left to jump to a topic.

🚀 Getting started

First-run setup

The first time you open a new server it asks you to set it up:

1. Start a new system — this is your first Sightwise server. Create an administrator username and password.
2. Add to an existing site — this server joins a site that already has one, so its cameras appear alongside the others. Enter the existing server's address and an admin login on it. (See Multi-server sites.)

Signing in

Sign in with your username and password, or with an access key (the keys live in config.json on the server — there is an admin, a viewer, and a wall key). Use user accounts for people, and keys for shared screens and scripts.

The three pages

• Server — add cameras, manage users, storage, the site, the hub, backups and updates (admins only).
• Live — watch live, play back recordings, and export clips.
• Walls — build and open fixed camera layouts for monitors.

📺 The live grid & layouts

The Live page shows your cameras in a grid. Drag a camera from the left list into the grid, or drag a whole group. Only the tiles on screen stream, to save bandwidth.

• Grid size — set columns × rows, or leave Auto to grow and shrink with the cameras.
• Names — toggle the camera name labels.
• Resize a tile — drag its bottom-right corner. Move — drag the name bar.
• Full screen a tile — double-click it.
• Save layout / Save as… — keep a layout to reopen later or Open as wall on a dedicated screen.
• Hotspots & zoom views — clickable markers that jump to another camera, and saved cropped sub-views, both set up per camera on the Server page.

⏱️ Playback & the timeline

Below the grid is the timeline. It shows recorded coverage (blue), and — when you run one — motion hits (red). Click the timeline to jump to that moment; the grid switches to playback and every camera on screen plays together, in sync.

Transport

• ● LIVE — jump back to live.
• ⏮ / ⏭ — step to the previous / next recording (skips gaps). While a motion search is active, these step through motion hits instead.
• ⏪ / ⏩ — skip 15 seconds back / forward.
• ❚❚ / ▶ — pause / play.
• Speed — 1× up to 16×.

Finding a time

• 📅 Calendar — days with footage are underlined; click one to jump there.
• Span — 1 h / 6 h / 24 h / all footage. You can also scroll over the timeline to zoom around the cursor.

⤓ Clips: export & mosaic

Everything you export or search starts from one selection on the timeline.

1. Make a selection — drag across the timeline. A highlighted band appears with a readout above it showing start → end · duration.
2. Fine-tune it — drag either handle to move an edge, or drag the band to slide the whole clip. Press Esc or ✕ to clear it.
3. Pick an action from the bar that appears under the timeline.

Actions

• Export camera — export the one camera chosen in the Camera list for the selected clip.
• All on screen — one MP4 per on-screen camera on this server.
• ⊞ Mosaic — combine the on-screen cameras into a single grid video.
• stamp — tick this to burn the timestamp and camera name into the clip (re-encodes, a little slower).

Results appear in one panel with progress and a Save link for each file. On a secure connection you get a "Save as…" dialog; otherwise the browser downloads it.

🔎 Motion search

Find movement inside a clip without scrubbing the whole thing.

1. Make a timeline selection and pick the camera.
2. Press Motion search. A grid overlay appears on the camera's picture.
3. Drag a rectangle on the picture to mark the area to watch (or press Whole picture). Drag again to add; start on a marked cell to clear.
4. Press Search clip. Moments with motion appear as red marks on the timeline and as a list of times.
5. Step through hits with ⏮ / ⏭, click a time, or press ▶ Play motion only to skip the quiet gaps.

🎥 Cameras & recording

Server → Cameras

• Add a camera — enter its RTSP URL(s) and credentials, or use Discover / ONVIF to find cameras on the network. The password is encrypted at rest and never shown back.
• Recording mode — always, motion-only, or a weekly schedule; set pre/post-event seconds for motion.
• Motion zones — paint which parts of the frame trigger motion, with per-area sensitivity.
• Streams — record the main and sub stream so playback and mobile can use the light stream on small tiles.
• Audio — opt in per camera (off by default).
• Retention — a maximum age, plus optional tiered rules (keep more for some date ranges).
• PTZ — pan/tilt/zoom controls on the tile for PTZ cameras, with saved presets and tours that rotate through them server-side.
• Storage — spread recording across several drives; Reindex rebuilds the catalog from files on disk.

👤 Users, roles & permissions

Server → Users

Roles

• Admin — everything, including settings and other users.
• Viewer — watch live, play back, export (within their scope).
• Wall — a dedicated screen login that resumes its layout automatically and shows nothing before sign-in.

Scoping who sees what

• Camera access — all cameras, or only the ones I pick. Pick individual cameras and/or whole camera groups. A group grant covers every camera in that group, including ones added to it later — the way to manage access at large scale.
• Time windows — limit live viewing to a weekly schedule and archive playback to a date range or rolling number of days (useful for tenants).
• Watermark — a tiled identity watermark (the viewer's name across the picture), driven by site-wide opacity/frequency and burned into their exports too.

You can invite a user by link, or set their password directly.

🖧 Multi-server sites

Several servers in one location form a site and appear together. On the second server choose Add to an existing site during setup, or add siblings later under Server → Site.

• Servers in this site — switch between them from the top bar; cameras from all of them show in the list.
• Move cameras between servers (their existing footage stays viewable on the old server).
• Settings sync — site name, watermark, saved logins and the update path stay in step across the site.

Cluster: balancing & failover

• Balance recording — preview a plan that levels load across servers and keeps different angles of a Location on separate servers, then apply it.
• Failover (opt-in per camera, on its Recording tab) — a backup server keeps a standby copy and takes over if the home server goes down, then hands back when it returns.
• Tidy leftover copies — remove dead disabled copies whose footage has aged out while the camera is live elsewhere.
• One continuous timeline — footage split across servers by failover or a move plays back as one timeline; Sightwise streams the remote parts for you.

☁️ Hub & remote access

The hub is a cloud instance that relays your sites, so you can reach them from anywhere without port-forwarding. Full step-by-step install is in docs/HUB-SETUP.md; the essentials:

1. On the hub (a server started in hub mode), open the Hub page and Add a site — it shows a one-time enrollment key.
2. On the site's server, open Server → Connect to hub and paste the hub address, site id and key, then Connect.
3. Sign in on the hub to see your sites. Each opens over the relay.

On the hub

• Central sign-on (SSO) — one hub account opens every site you're allowed to; sites trust a signed assertion from the hub. Supports OIDC / Entra federation.
• Per-site access scopes — limit a hub user to certain sites, with an optional per-site role.
• Multi-site camera directory — search cameras across all your sites.
• Cross-site walls — build and save walls that mix cameras from several sites, then open them as a grid.
• Release feed — the hub can host updates for the fleet.

🔔 Alerts & notifications

Events — a camera going offline, recording stopping, low disk, a failed backup, the server restarting — become alerts. Each user chooses how they want to hear about each kind.

Your notification settings

Open the 🔔 bell (top-right on desktop, the header on mobile) → Notification settings. For each alert type pick any of:

• In-app — shows in the bell with an unread count.
• Email — sent to your address (needs the email account set up, below).
• Push — a notification on your phone or desktop (press Enable push on this device first).
• Sound — a chime in the browser.

You can also set a minimum severity and quiet hours. Everything is opt-in — nothing is forced on anyone.

Email account (admins)

Server → Alerts & email

Enter your SMTP host, port, username, password and From address, then Send test email to confirm it works. This is what email alerts send through.

📱 The mobile app

Open your server's address on a phone and you get the mobile app automatically. Install it from the browser's "Add to Home Screen" for a full-screen, app-like experience and push notifications.

• Bottom bar — Cameras · Alerts · Sites · Menu.
• Sites — searchable list; switch between servers.
• Tap a camera for full screen: live, playback (scrub the timeline), pinch or ± to zoom, PTZ pad and tours, Listen.
• 📅 jump to a day; ⏮ / ⏭ step recordings.
• ⋮ menu — Snapshot the current frame to your phone, Export a clip (quick durations), Motion search, quality and info.
• Alerts — view notifications and Enable push on this device.
• Menu — server health, a Live-previews toggle, and version.

🛠️ Backup, restore & updates

Server → Backup, and Server → Updates

• Backup / restore — save the server's configuration (cameras, users, settings) to a file and restore it later. Schedule automatic backups and keep the last N.
• Updates — point the server at a network share or the hub's release feed to see the latest version, then update this server or every server that's behind. Updates are checksum-verified, with a one-click rollback copy kept.

❓ Troubleshooting

A camera shows "connecting" or black

Check its RTSP URL and credentials on the Server page (use the test button), and that the NVR can reach the camera's IP. Try the sub-stream.

The timeline is empty

The timeline only appears for keys/users that may play back recordings, and only when a camera that records is on screen. Check the camera's recording mode and retention, and that a drive has free space.

I can't export

Exporting needs the export right. Make a timeline selection first — the action bar only appears when a clip is selected.

Email or push isn't arriving

For email, confirm the SMTP account with Send test email. For push, press Enable push on this device in notification settings and allow notifications in the browser; each device enables separately.

Still stuck?

Note your server version (shown top-right) and check the server log. For hub setup, see docs/HUB-SETUP.md.