sentrysearch
AI
video search
SHOW HN2026
How HN took it
15 positive, 35 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 0 critical, out of 51 comments about the project. Thread score +0.29.
Idea: 10 for, 0 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 againstPerformance: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Native video embedding is impressive and useful for dashcam and home security footage
From 3 comments
very cool, anybody have apparent use cases for this?
Aeroi on HNVery interesting (not for a dashcam, but for home monitoring).
mdrzn on HNThe cost structure here is what stands out to me. $2.50/hr makes this viable for personal or small-business use cases that would have been unthinkable a year ago — security…
emmitska on HN
Natural language search of footage is a practical use case
From 2 comments
I picked up a Rexing dash cam a few months back and after getting frustrated with how clunky it is to get footage of it, I decided to look into building something out myself to…
rigrassm on HNThis is one of those “oh, that’s actually a real product now” demos way more interesting than yet another chat wrapper.
QubridAI on HN
Objections
Surveillance and privacy concerns about AI indexing camera feeds
From 3 comments
This is a really cool implementation—embeddings still often feel like magic to me. That said, this exact use case is sort of also my biggest point of concern with where AI takes…
macNchz on HNIt's being built as we speak. I attended at a city council meeting yesterday, discussing approving a contract for ALPR cameras. I learned about a product from the camera vendor…
citruscomputing on HNMan, the surveillance applications for this are staggering.
stavros on HN
Cost of indexing is high for continuous use
From 2 comments
This seems like something that would be very expensive to run. Do you have some representative figures at a particular resolution and frame rate?
febed on HNTotally valid concern. Right now the cost ($2.50/hr) and latency make continuous real-time indexing impractical, but that won't always be the case. This is one of the reasons I'd…
sohamrj on HN
Cost per hour claim disputed; frame rate math questioned
From 3 comments
How are you getting to $2.50/hr ? The price sheet says its 0.00079 per frame. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-embedding-2
jimmySixDOF on HNFrom what I see the code downsamples video to 5 fps, so 1 hour of video is 3600 seconds * 5 fps = 18,000 frames. 18,000 frames * $0.00079/frame = $14.22. A couple dollars more…
jjwiseman on HNyou're right that the code uses ffmpeg to downsample the chunks to 5fps before sending them, but that's only a local/bandwidth optimization, not what the api actually processes.…
sohamrj on HN
Requests
Local or open-weight video embedding model to avoid uploading footage
From 3 comments
Is there a decent open video embedding model out there? I’d love to play with this without uploading video.
rao-v on HNDoes anyone know of an open weights models that can embed video? Would love to experiment locally with this.
kamranjon on HNIs there a local model that this would work with?
ideashower on HN
Threshold for low-confidence matches
From 2 comments
Nice use of native video embedding. How do you handle cases where Gemini's response confidence is low? Do you have a fallback or threshold?
dev_tools_lab on HNMakes sense for now. Thresholding becomes critical at scale though — good luck with the next iteration!
dev_tools_lab on HN
Questions
Can it search for a specific person from a photo
From 1 comment
Can I give it a photo of a person and ask it to search for the person in the video?
subhashp on HN
Does it work on dance videos or audio
From 2 comments
I wonder how well this would work with dance videos.
crashabr on HN> No transcription, no frame captioning, no intermediate text. If there is text on the video (like a caption or wtv), will the embedding capture that? Never thought about this…
SpaceManNabs on HN
Alternatives named
sentinelsearch local proof of concept using Qwen3-VL embedding
From 2 comments
Very cool stuff, gave me the inspiration to try it locally. Works fairly well I think: https://github.com/jakejimenez/sentinelsearch
jakejmnz on HNmore or less works similarly, made a proof of concept for it: https://github.com/jakejimenez/sentinelsearch
jakejmnz on HN
Intel OpenVINO AI video retrieval
From 1 comment
this can be done locally https://github.com/intel/openvino-ai-video-retrieval-analysis
martz on HN
Fusus and ALPR camera dashboards
From 1 comment
It's being built as we speak. I attended at a city council meeting yesterday, discussing approving a contract for ALPR cameras. I learned about a product from the camera vendor…
citruscomputing on HN