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Continuous capture: lower frame rates (feature request?)

edited March 2019 in SecuritySpy
The "old" version of SecuritySpy supported continuous capture with multiple seconds between frames. This was very useful for high-motion areas where motion detection was not usable, but there was still a desire for reasonably-sized movies of events throughout the day. This is also useful for "log of events" where you want to see when a particular thing moves in or out of the field of view. Key in the old functionality was that filesize was very small since it could be many seconds between frames.

The new versions of SecuritySpy do not seem to have this. The minimum framerate seems to be 1 per second, even when putting in decimal values into the "frames per second" area. Filesize grows rapidly, and overwhelms my disk IO and storage space when I turn on both motion detection and timelapse, meaning that timelapse is essentially useless. Files grow by a megabyte every two or three seconds. Multiply this by 10 or 15 cameras, and it's a non-starter, even with SSD and all kinds of clever rsync'ing to keep space on the primary storage drive.

Can SecuritySpy support a decimal rate for frames per second on continuous capture to emulate the past performance?

JT

Comments

  • Hi JT,

    Yes, SecuritySpy does support this, but you must turn on the "Recompress video data" option for the camera under the Device tab. From the user manual:

    Movie capture - Capture rate
    This is the rate at which to capture frames to the movie (leave empty for the maximum rate). Note however that if the incoming video is in MPEG-4 or H.264 format, and you have chosen not to recompress the video (see the Device settings), SecuritySpy will be unable to change the frame rate of the video, and it will therefore be recorded at whatever rate is being supplied by the camera.
  • edited March 2019
    I made that guess a while back, but with no luck. None of my cameras are recompressing video (and never really have - disk is cheap, and CPU is limited.) I'm also not watermarking any of the images; the cameras do all that. No audio on any devices (though strangely the camera list show the microphone icon, and I can click it... which is strange, since I have specified no audio on all devices.) All the cameras are Amcrest H.264 RTSP. My CPU (Xserve 16 threads) agrees with me - 30% load with 9 cameras at 12fps 4megapixel. If I was re-compressing, the machine would fall over.

    I've got 4.2.9 running, and when I turn on continuous capture with a frame rate of .1, this would imply one frame every 10 seconds, right? So a playback of 25fps would condense 250 seconds into one second of viewed video. However, the continuous capture files when viewed show one frame per second (actually slightly less, but it's not clear how much less.) Playback of the file looks sort-of realtime, with the clocks on the cameras showing the seconds tick by one at a time. Setting the capture rate to .01 gives exactly the same results when the video is viewed. The file increments at about a megabyte per second, no matter what I do.

    Happy to provide remote access if you want to check it out.

    JT
  • BenBen
    edited March 2019
    Yes, a capture rate of 0.1 should give you one frame captured every 10 seconds, and if you have specified a playback rate of faster than the capture rate, you shouldn't be getting real-time capture.

    So that I can check your settings, please do this:

    - Hold the alt (option) key while clicking on the File menu in SecuritySpy
    - From the Debug submenu, select "Create Debug File On Desktop"
    - Email this file to us at support@bensoftware.com and reference this forum discussion thread in your email.
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