The explosive growth of computing media solutions has created new challenges in the built environment research. In the recent decade, researchers from diverse interests have been employing combination of video surveillance techniques and physical computing methods to understand social behavioural patterns in built environment research. This paper is developed on the research issues that constraint the use of video analytical techniques in built environment research. This paper is composed of three parts. The first part gives a description on how video analysis helps to investigate qualitative dimensions in built environment research. The second part is developed with the explanation of two different cases, in which authors have deployed video techniques in their individual research dissertation projects for understanding the social behaviours of space. In the first case, video data is collected without the consent of targeted audience in a given space and thus analysed using physical computing methods in order to understand the interactive quality of that space. The second case describes how video techniques were adapted to understand the role of culture in post disaster contexts with the consent of the target group. The final part critically analyses the above described two cases in order to identify the issues that limit or constraint the adaptation of video approaches for built environment research. It concludes various issues and possible recommendations to encourage and further qualify video research methods in the built environment context.