Basic understanding for non-subscriber

[yellowbarchetta]

Just wanted a lay-person's understanding of how this project interacts with Blink when used with HomeAssistant.

I'm a non-subscriber with a SyncModule2 which has a USB stick in it.

If I understand the "save videos" action in HA, this pulls the recently available videos that are on the Blink Servers (for up to 1 hour) down to the HomeAssistant server. I've got that working; does this mean that all videos are actually sent to the cloud anyway (even if I don't subscribe) but they are just not retained by Blink if I am not a subscriber? And can I / should I now ditch my USB storage on the Sync Module?

Apologies if the answer to this is obvious elsewhere, but I wasn't sure!

[fronzbot]

Good questions that I also don't know the answer to. I believe if you have local storage what the Blink servers do is roughly this flow:

1. User requests a video from local storage
2. Blink queries sync module for requested video
3. If found, video is uploaded to blink server
4. Blink app (or whatever) then can retrieve this url to serve the clip (or download it elsewhere)

So I think the answers are:

does this mean that all videos are actually sent to the cloud anyway (even if I don't subscribe)

Yes

they are just not retained by Blink if I am not a subscriber?

They shouldn't be, but I don't trust Amazon to delete data (personally)

And can I / should I now ditch my USB storage on the Sync Module?

I think you still would need this

[yellowbarchetta]

Thanks, that's helpful. As you may have guessed I am a non-subscriber, but am playing with this using HomeAssistant and was delighted to find that your scripting can do what Blink themselves say is not possible - i.e. grab video from the SyncModule and download it to another location.
So at the moment I've got a HomeAssistant automation running every 5 minutes (this may be overkill) to do the "Save Recent Clips" action which is (for the time being at least!) successfully copying the files to the HA server and as far as i can tell this is creating an archive which matches that on the USB stick.
My next dilemma is to work out how close to "live" i can get this process to be so that I can use HA to serve me the notifications and clips. I believe this will never be completely "live" due to polling restrictions on the HA / Blink integration (but I may be wrong).
If I have a camera set to record for up to 15s (and end early if possible) and not to retrigger for 20s I should have some of that 20s to issue commands from HA perhaps to "save video" because the camera shouldn't be busy recording and the network should be OK to grab the file via the mechanism you describe above.
Does that sound plausible?