Q3 2026 Release Notes

July - September 2026

New Features

Accounts and access

• Automatic account lockout. An account locks itself after ten wrong passwords in fifteen minutes, or five wrong verification codes. The lock lasts fifteen minutes, or an hour if it happens again without a successful sign-in between, and always clears on its own, so nobody waits on an administrator to get back to their cameras. The account holder is emailed when it happens, and setting a new password from the reset email clears the lock at once. See the new Account Lockout page.
• Sign in to the iOS app with Google, including passkeys.
• Limit a person to particular sites. Integrators, administrators and distributors now have a Site access section on their Permissions tab, with an All sites switch per timeline. It starts switched on, so nothing changes until you deliberately turn it off. Turn it off and tick the sites that person should reach: events, live view, recordings, cameras, TetherBoxes, alarms and number plates all follow that choice, so an unticked site simply is not there for them. The list only offers sites you can see yourself, so nobody can hand out access they do not have.

TetherBoxes

• Move a TetherBox to another timeline from the Actions section of its page. Pick an existing timeline or name a new one, and it goes across with its site, cameras, zones, network devices, alarms, access control, event history and the footage recorded on the TetherBox itself, where this previously meant a factory reset and losing all of it. Cloud footage is the exception, because cloud storage paths are built from the timeline name, so you are told how many cameras and how much footage will be deleted before you confirm. Cloud recording is not cancelled: each camera uploads to its new location once the move finishes. The move runs in the background and emails you when it completes. See the new Timelines page.
• Administrators can reboot, shut down, factory reset and move a TetherBox, format its drives and manage its USB devices. These were Integrator actions, so an owner who locked their installer out after commissioning, which the Integrator type is designed for, could no longer maintain their own hardware, and the buttons were simply absent from the TetherBox page. Each still asks for your password and, where it applies, a reason.
• Run TetherBox as a virtual machine on a spare PC or server. The new Running TetherBox in VirtualBox guide covers installing VirtualBox, importing the appliance, switching to bridged networking so it can see your cameras, and adding a disk for recordings.

Camera deterrents

• Set off a camera's own siren, warning speaker or white-light strobe from TetherX. The outputs appear as buttons in Live View and on the Camera API Tab, which also sets strobe duration, which built-in warning message to play and at what volume, and which output to close on a camera with more than one. It lists what the camera actually has: speaker, strobe, alarm output, alarm input, microphone inputs, and separately its night-vision lighting, which is not a deterrent. Nothing is guessed from the model name, so a control appears only when the camera reports the hardware, and its own answer is passed back, so a camera that refuses says so rather than showing a false confirmation. The operator console's Siren / Strobe entry, which previously did nothing, now fires the real thing. First vendor supported: TVT, including its LTS, InVid, Avycon and Provision-ISR rebadges.
• Picture controls on the Camera API Tab: brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, the infrared cut filter, focus mode and white balance, read from the camera and written back, and only what you change is sent. Every control uses the camera's own declared limits, so nothing is guessed: this TVT's sharpness runs 0-255, and a fixed 0-100 slider would have clipped it to under half its range. A setting the camera reports no range for gets no control rather than a made-up one, and one it never mentions is shown as unsupported rather than as off. Exposure is deliberately absent, because on the reference camera the limits come back impossible, with a minimum exposure time above the maximum and a gain whose minimum equals its maximum.

API Changes

The full interactive reference lives under Developers.

• Deterrents are on the public API, alongside audio challenge. GET /api/v3p/zones/{id}/deterrents lists what the camera in a zone actually has, including the names of its built-in warning messages and its alarm outputs. POST /api/v3p/zones/{id}/deterrent triggers one. GET /api/v3p/zones/{id}/deterrent_status reads back whether the speaker is playing, the lamp is lit or the contact is closed right now, which is the only real confirmation that something fired. A camera without the hardware, a firmware that refuses and an offline TetherBox are all reported as errors, so an integration can never record a trigger that never happened. Full reference under Zones.
• The SIA alarm endpoint now says which part of a message it rejected. POST /api/v3/alarms/sia_event previously answered every malformed string with the same sentence, leaving no way to tell a bad account number from a bad timestamp. It now names the segment and the shape expected for it, for example "The area segment riXX is not valid. Expected ri followed by a two-digit area, such as ri01." Errors are also proper JSON now, in the same envelope the /api/v3p/ endpoints use, where they were previously sent as an unquoted string that a JSON client could not read.
• Malformed requests answer 4xx instead of 500. A body that is not the content type it declares now answers 400, and a missing parameter answers 422, across the /api/v3/ endpoints. Both previously returned a server error page telling the caller to read our log file.
• The SIA documentation now describes the format it actually accepts. The published description covered neither the permitted characters for each segment, nor that a Virtual alarm with a matching Transmitter ID must exist first, nor that JSON bodies are accepted. It also documented one message format for both the TCP receiver and the REST endpoint, which take different messages. The two are now described separately, and the examples in the documentation are checked against the parser so a copied example cannot be one the endpoint rejects.

Improvements

Activation and onboarding

• Activation looks and behaves the same on every step: one card per step, a progress bar, and a panel naming the TetherBox you are activating with its live status. A unit that has not reached us says so plainly with a link to the troubleshooting guide, instead of the old warning that read "your TetherBox is presently" followed by a red dot.
• Choosing between an existing timeline or site and a new one is a straight pick-one rather than a pair of tabs, showing only the fields for your answer. Both default to new, which is what most activations are, and an answer survives a validation error rather than reverting. Leaving it blank now tells you so in the same place and style as every other form error, rather than failing silently.
• The address on the activation and site forms puts city, region, postcode and country in two columns rather than one long stack, and the "is this a chain" question is a single switch with an explanation instead of a pair of Yes/No radios.
• A required field is marked the same way everywhere: a small red dot at the end of its label, with a tooltip. It replaces the red asterisk, which was drawn differently on different forms and not at all beside a tickbox, so there was no way to tell that a box had to be ticked.

Cameras and configuration

• The Cameras list shows the newest cameras first by default, and a new Audio column tells you whether each camera is actually recording sound. The camera export in CSV and Excel includes the same. A camera counts as recording audio only when audio is switched on and the recording stream genuinely carries a sound track.
• The Camera API Tab reads correctly. Sections whose value is a single item (Model) or empty (Audio Set Error) used to expand to an empty box, and one the camera answered with nothing is no longer listed as available at all. Device Information listed every field twice, because the camera answers natively and over ONVIF and the two spell field names differently; there is now one row per fact, and where they genuinely disagree (this TVT reports firmware 5.1.2.0(46419) natively and 5.1 over ONVIF) both are shown and labelled rather than one dropped. Field names are spelled properly throughout: IP Filter, DHCPv6, TLS 1.2, X.509, IPv6, Dot1X.
• Hovering the illumination hardware listed on a camera explains what each lamp is, and in particular that none is a red/blue beacon and none flashes. Dual light is the infrared plus white supplement lamp used for night vision, smart light is the camera choosing between them automatically, and the deterrent strobe is the separate white light listed above.
• Hovering the live preview for a monitor-only camera with no snapshot set up shows a short "not configured" note instead of a broken image.

Storage and health

• The Storage tab makes clear when a drive's health readings are historical. An unplugged drive's SMART Health card is tinted amber, its heading shows how long ago the drive was last seen, and a note explains the figures are the last data we had. Previously the old readings looked like current information.
• The Health Report treats a TetherBox that has stopped recording for want of a storage drive as a critical issue at the top of the list, rather than a suggestion further down. A unit with no storage drive stops recording to protect its built-in card, so no footage is being kept at all, and both the report and the alert now say plainly that its cameras are NOT recording until you connect or replace the drive. Units still recording onto an undersized drive stay a suggestion, with the softer wording.
• The weekly and monthly Health Reports show footage gaps over the last 7 days as well as the last 24 hours, so an occasional gap that never crosses the daily threshold still surfaces. A camera with both is listed once, showing each count, for example "12 in 24hr / 40 in 7d". The daily report is unchanged.
• The connection status popover and the badge on the TetherBox list show while a unit is updating and how long the update has been running, and clear as soon as it finishes. The badge no longer disappears when a unit checks in part-way through an update, nor lingers for an hour afterwards, including when a unit is reinstalled with the software it already had.

Events, recordings and live view

• Recording and event pages use a single layout that adapts to any screen instead of switching between separate mobile and desktop versions. Turn a phone to landscape and the video fills the screen, with the thumbnail strip and the speed, grid and size controls tidied away so the picture and its scrub bar are all that remain.
• The recording scrub bar loads a spread of preview thumbnails straight away, so on a slow connection you can scrub close to the right spot without waiting for the whole timeline.
• The live camera wall re-fits when you rotate a phone, filling the screen rather than leaving the cameras bunched at the top.
• On phones in landscape, page content stays clear of the screen notch or cut-out.
• Talkdown messages in live view come from the camera's own TetherBox timeline, so an operator working across more than one site sees that camera's recorded messages instead of an empty list. The menu shows "No Recordings" when there are none, instead of an empty strip that looked broken.
• Playing an audio message, from either live view or the event console, gives a clear reason when it cannot play instead of doing nothing. A camera with no speaker set explains how to fix it and links straight to that camera's Audio output settings.
• An event with no footage yet shows a clear "no recordings" message in the player area instead of a blank black box. The real player still swaps in as soon as the first recording arrives.
• The status badges on event thumbnails all read the same way: a white symbol on a coloured disc, red for a fault such as a camera reporting slow storage, green and blue for the plate and visitor badges. Each badge previously drew its own symbol on a small white dot, which at thumbnail size was harder to tell apart from the picture behind it.

Operator console and notifications

• The operator console offers the contacts for the site the event came from, instead of everyone on the timeline. Send Report and Escalate open with the right people filled in, and Call lists only the people who look after that site, so handling one site in a large timeline no longer means ringing every other site's contacts.
• Your notification preferences live on their own Notifications tab on your profile, so every user can find and change their own alerts. They were previously inside the Permissions tab, which only administrators, integrators and staff could open. Every user now also gets the weekly Health Report by default and can switch it on or off there, where previously only integrators and staff received it.
• Offline alert emails include a Notification Settings button and list everyone who was alerted, with a link to change who is told when that TetherBox goes offline. Previously there was no way to tell from the email who else received it or how to stop receiving them.
• The factory reset and activation emails read like the rest of our email: the facts as a table, each one a link to the TetherBox, timeline, site or person it names, so you can open the TetherBox you have just activated straight from the email.
• The factory reset email names the reason the reset was requested, next to the TetherBox, timeline, site and the person who asked for it. The reason has always been asked for, and where "Other" was chosen the email carries what was typed in, so everyone told about a reset can see why it was ordered. The staff note kept on the unit records the same wording, rather than the internal name for the reason it used to store.

Elsewhere in the platform

• The Site page has an IMMIX & Sentinel tab for the alarm-receiving-centre settings (send to IMMIX, Sentinel Site ID and device address) and the custom email server settings for that site, editable in place. These could previously only be changed from the separate Site edit form.
• The TetherBox page has an Events button next to Live, for all events recorded by that TetherBox.
• The ANPR plates-per-day chart draws a separate line for each direction of travel, plus an Unknown line for cameras that do not report one, instead of one combined total.
• The report inside an event-download ZIP records who requested the download, with their name and email, and the IP address it came from, so exports carry an audit trail of who took footage and from where.
• The audit sessions page loads faster.

Help and documentation

• A new Timelines page explains what a timeline is, when a second one is worth having, and how large one should get before splitting, for which we suggest around 1,000 cameras. The activation hint and the Definitions page link to it.
• A new Getting Started page covers the first things to do with a new timeline, and the activation confirmation email links to it.
• The Pre-Flight Checklist for integrators has been rewritten: the three things that actually send an engineer back a second time are at the top, the post-install checks are a table of what good looks like, and the checkboxes that used to print as literal "[ ]" are gone.
• The Troubleshooting Kit page says what to carry as a condition rather than assuming you installed the unit: a screen is an HDMI monitor or a USB-C to HDMI adapter that turns your laptop into one, with a photograph of the adapter. Spare drives are 128 GB or larger, and the TetherBox Giga takes a suitable ATX or compatible supply rather than the 19 V figure printed before, which was wrong.
• The Monitoring Station Operator Guide says which accounts appear in the console's Send Report and Call menus, and why one might be missing: Call lists only people with a mobile number, and a supervisor whose zone permissions do not cover the site is not offered at all.
• The Two-Factor Authentication page explains what makes a valid password and what gets rejected (common passwords, your email address, simple sequences), with examples.
• A new Where to Run the TetherBox Software page covers the two ways to deploy the bridge software: on site, on the same network as the equipment, or centrally, reaching it across a link. It compares the two on recording through an outage, bandwidth, Internet exposure and remote management, lists what a central deployment needs before you commit to it, and works through two real sites that started central and moved on site, including an academy whose recording traffic saturated a 2.5 Gbps core at exactly the times footage gets asked for. Eight cameras at 4 Mbps is roughly 10 TB a month across the link, which is the figure that decides the design on anything metered or cellular.
• Tables in help articles and release notes wrap their text instead of scrolling sideways. Cells inherited the white-space: nowrap the platform's data tables rely on, so a comparison table of full sentences sized itself to its longest sentence and pushed the page off screen.

Bug Fixes

Storage drives

• A drive that has been unplugged no longer keeps showing as online, and the Storage tab says why a drive is missing: "Unplugged", "Not answering" or "Unreadable", clearing the moment the drive answers again. A removed drive could stay listed as online with a fresh "last seen" on every check-in, because Linux can keep the device entry behind after it is unplugged and the unit filled in the serial number from its own remembered list, so a drive moved into a NAS still looked live with health figures months out of date. A drive is now only recorded when the health reading genuinely identifies one.
• An internal drive that has been swapped out shows as "Unplugged" and no longer offers a Format button. Previously, after a boot drive upgrade, the old drive lingered in the Storage tab with a Format option.
• A unit failing its own storage write test is no longer shown as healthy. The unit checks every five minutes that its recording disk can take a write and read it back; when that failed on the recorder's own mount nothing was ever sent to us, so one unit failed 1,509 times over two days and stayed green throughout. Those failures now reach the cloud and clear once the disk recovers.
• Drive wear is judged from the drive's own remaining-life percentage everywhere. Some drives report wear in a maker-specific way, so a nearly-new Samsung 870 EVO could be flagged in the summary while its detail row correctly showed it as healthy, and LiteOn and Plextor M6S models were marked "Critical" and shown an impossibly small amount of data written. The misleading lifetime-written figure is no longer shown for those drives.
• Drives are no longer flagged as too hot when running within their rated temperature. Surveillance drives such as Seagate SkyHawk are rated to 70°C, but the health check used a fixed 60°C limit. Each drive's own rated maximum is now used where the drive reports it.
• A drive running at exactly its rated maximum temperature is shown as warm rather than too hot. Each drive is checked against the maximum operating temperature it reports, but a drive sitting on that figure was flagged as overheating, so a Samsung 870 EVO rated to 70°C was reported as too hot at 70°C and included in the weekly health report. A drive is flagged only once it is above its rated maximum, which is the point at which it is running outside the range the manufacturer specifies.
• A drive reporting 0 bytes gets a clear message instead of being called "too small for recording", which made no sense at that size. This happens when a drive is dead, or a USB adapter is not presenting any storage, and the alert now says the drive is connected but reports 0 bytes, and to try re-plugging or replacing it.
• Older TetherBoxes no longer show a false "reconnect your storage drive" alert. These units cannot report drive status, so the health check skips that warning for them.

Cameras and devices

• Cameras no longer briefly drop out after a TetherBox software update. When a unit updates it reloads its settings and re-reports its cameras, and a camera whose device was not being actively monitored could be removed by mistake, cutting live view and recording for a few minutes. Devices now stay on the box through an update and are removed only when actually deleted.
• Bulk editing cameras saves device-level settings such as Disable API, Disable Defaults, camera username and password, ports and connection options. These were previously discarded silently, so the cameras kept their old settings. The connection settings are also labelled with correct capitalisation (Force TCP, ONVIF Port, RTSP Port, URL Auth).
• The camera's Device Information panel spells hardware terms properly: CPU, GPU, NPU, RAM and ISP in capitals, rather than "Cpu", "Ram" and "Isp Version". The labels are generated from whatever names the camera sends, so every camera reporting these fields is fixed, not just the one that surfaced it.
• Filtering the Cameras list by Online no longer includes cameras whose TetherBox is offline. These correctly show under Offline instead.
• The TetherBox and camera pages update online status live again, turning green on their own without a reload.
• Moving a device to a different TetherBox no longer fails when one of its cameras uses a port already taken on the destination unit. The cameras are given free ports instead.
• Scanning the network from the Network Devices page no longer fails with "you are not authorised to access this page". Integrators and admins with network device access can start a full scan again, which speeds up commissioning when a TetherBox has not yet picked up the cameras.
• The camera's MAC address is shown again on the camera page, on the subscription line and in the cameras spreadsheet export. It had been blank on every camera since cameras and devices were split apart, because the page was reading a camera field that nothing filled in. It now reads the address from the device the camera belongs to, which is where it has always been recorded.
• The PTZ preset list loads again. Fetching presets had failed on every camera since the end of July: the name the browser sends for that command no longer matched the one the TetherBox accepts, so the request was rejected before it reached the camera, and the list came back as an error. The preset list also arrives in a field of its own now, rather than in the field that says whether the command worked.
• A command a camera or a TetherBox refuses is reported as a refusal, with the reason the camera gave. Every answer from a unit now comes back in one shape, so a camera that has no speaker, a camera that never answered and a unit that is offline are told apart instead of being flattened into one "could not be processed" message — and a command that never happened can no longer be reported as one that did.
• Moving a camera off the Alarm Only cloud plan stops the daily alarm recording limit emails. Switching to Timelapse During Events, or any other plan, could leave the alarm-only setting behind so the camera kept warning its daily limit had been reached. The plan on the slider is now the only thing that decides this.

Events, recordings and timelapse

• The picture shown for an event uses the most interesting frame from the recording, preferring a moving person, then a face, then a moving vehicle, rather than whichever segment was recorded last.
• Deleting several events at once from the Events page clears them all from the screen. Previously only the last one disappeared and the rest stayed until you reloaded.
• The full-screen button in the recording and event player works on iPhone.
• The event player no longer asks the server for a thumbnail it has already loaded. On a long event whose footage was still arriving, the strip of frames under the player could request a picture with no address, which the browser turned into a request for an address that does not exist. On an event page that quietly redirected to the home page and downloaded it in the background; on a timelapse page it produced an error page. Both are fixed, and a timelapse address with an unreadable date now answers "not found" instead of failing.
• Timelapse works properly on phones again. The time slider no longer shows "Invalid date" or stops responding, dragging previews the frame under your finger straight away, and pressing play from the middle keeps loading the following frames. The scrub bar strip is no longer too tall, the picture no longer flashes a spinner between frames, and the date and time above the scrub bar keep updating. A missing frame no longer leaves an "Image Missing" message stuck over the picture once you drag to a moment that has one.

Navigation and layout

• A link that points at a particular tab now opens that tab. Links from alert emails, health alerts and buttons around the platform, for example straight to a TetherBox's Settings, Storage or Staff tab, marked the tab as selected but still showed the Summary page underneath.
• Tabs that fetch their contents when opened (a user's Audit Log, a camera's Logs, the audit history on a storage unit) no longer sit on a loading spinner. The click itself starts the load; previously the tab waited for the browser to decide the panel was on screen, which could take several seconds or not happen at all.
• Switching timeline no longer briefly shows another customer's data or reverts to the previously selected timeline on the next page. On mobile, changing the timeline on the Events page closes the menu so you can see the refreshed results.
• Alert messages and status tables no longer sit slightly off-centre or run off the left edge on phones.
• Filtering a table down to fewer rows no longer leaves a block of empty space beneath the results.
• Following a link from an email while signed out returns you to the exact page after you sign in. The part of the address after the question mark was dropped, so the Submit Offline Report button in an offline alert landed you on the TetherBox page without the report form open.

Smaller fixes

• Choosing "Other" as the reason for a factory reset reveals the box to type that reason in. The field was there but never appeared, so the only reason you could not give was the one that needed explaining.
• Updating your account settings from the pop-up form no longer shows a "this didn't load" error. The form saves and closes cleanly.
• The weekly Health Report summary counts add up. The three tiles read Critical, Noteworthy and Suggestions and match the sections below. Previously the tiles counted differently from the headline, so a report could say "5 items" with tiles summing to 6. Suggestions are advice for improvement and are now listed and counted separately from the issues to review.
• The "Change who is notified" link in an offline alert email takes you somewhere you can change it: the people list for that TetherBox's timeline if you may see it, otherwise your own notification settings. It previously opened the TetherBox settings, which only turn alerts on or off for everybody.
• A word matched by a knowledge-base search is set exactly like the text around it, with only its highlight to mark it. In a result title it was drawn noticeably lighter than the rest of the heading, so the word you searched for stood out least.
• On the Native Apps page, the App Store and Google Play badges open the store listing when clicked, rather than showing a larger copy of the badge image.
• A TetherBox's connection history shows when each connection actually started and ended. Entries between late March and late October could be recorded an hour late, so a disconnection could appear to happen after the reconnection that followed it. Existing entries have been corrected.
• You can open the Texecom installation manual from the Texecom page. Both links to it pointed at an address the manual is not stored at, so selecting either one showed a file-not-found page instead.
• Restarting a TetherBox only reports success when the restart was actually sent. When the usual route to the box is unavailable the platform falls back to a direct connection, and it had been treating that connection dying as proof the restart had gone through. A box whose remote access is broken drops the connection before it accepts anything, so those units — exactly the ones the fallback exists for — were told "Reboot initiated" having done nothing at all. The fallback now confirms the connection works before it sends the restart, and says the restart was not sent when it cannot.
• TetherBox online and offline alerts reach the people who should get them. Working out who to tell asked whether the TetherBox belonged to a zone, and every TetherBox appeared to, because the name also covered the box's timezone. Deciding who to notify then failed, and no alert went out at all.

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