Guard Assistant

Guard Assistant is a software application which enables you to set up a simple surveillance system in your home or office and connect to it remotely to check up on it.

The installation process does not last longer than a few seconds and runs quite smooth, while the GUI you are brought to present a design which can only be described as a bit convoluted. To be more precise, it contains a great deal of information, a few buttons and some tabs. You can easily access a lot of options, yet novice users might encounter a few difficulties when trying to find their way around it. Moreover, Help contents are not integrated.

This program enables you to easily view your web camera’s feed, as well as remotely keep an eye on your office or home with the help of an FTP host. The image feed is also displayed in the main window, along with source resolution, number of frames per second supported, web size, aspect ratio and IP address.

It is possible to stop or start recording with the help of the built-in buttons, as well as refresh the list of connected devices. A grayscale effect can be applied and logging can be enabled. The latter enables you to take pictures at a specified time interval (expressed in seconds), include timestamps and save the resulted items to the hard disk using a custom quality JPG format.

To conclude, Guard Assistant is a pretty efficient piece of software when it comes to setting up a simple surveillance system. The response time is good and the amount of resources required in order to fully work is low at all times. However, the interface could benefit from more work and it lacks multiple options that other similar products include, such as support for a multi-cam system and recording using video extensions.