Pressure - Camera Overview

DaveGarratt
DaveGarratt
edited August 2021 in SecuritySpy
Sometimes when I am looking at the console I see that the 12 cameras have no apparent pressure being recorded on the decoder, when other times they are all going crazy. The cameras are all LAN, connected to a single DVR, and record on motion only. I did notice that if I cover the Security Spy Window with another app - Chrome for example for a few seconds and then bring it to the front, it appears that Pressure has dropped to almost nothing and then it rises again. Could this behavior be influenced by day night images - I would have expected that decoding and image would be a constant overhead.

Comments

  • DaveGarratt
    DaveGarratt
    I think this issue only occurs when I am viewing the app running on my Mac Mini via a Screen Sharing session. When I use the console direct I don't see any Decoding spikes.
  • Ben
    Ben
    Hi Dave, I presume you are referring to the video decoder pressure here. This is a measure of how fast frames are being queued for decoding vs. how fast they are actually being decoded. If frames are being queued faster than they can be decoded, they build up in the queue, eventually leading to dropped chunks of video as decoding has to be turned off for a short time to catch up.

    Frames are coming in at a constant rate, but the amount of resources that can be dedicated to decoding at a particular time vary depending on what else the Mac has to do at that time. Things like web activity (encoding video for streaming via SecuritySpy's web interface), and other apps doing image encoding/decoding (which includes screen sharing) can all take processing resources away from SecuritySpy.

    So it sounds like your Mac is close to its decoding limit at base, and any additional load (e.g. Screen Sharing) is pushing it over the edge and leading to increasing pressure. The easiest thing you can do to avoid this is to reduce the frame rates of all your cameras just a bit (e.g. go from 10fps to 8fps each). Otherwise, upgrading your Mac to a faster model is the next option, if this is becoming a problem or if you plan to add more cameras.

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