Advice please: 1 FPS recording vs snapshots.

[Fellhahn]

Hi there,

Just wanted some quick opinions/advice.

I have three IP cameras connected to Blue Iris, output streams are 1080P using HEVC.

Motion events trigger recording in 20 seconds clips (5 second pre, 15 seconds post). Events record at 15fps.

Every so often I find myself in need of footage/imagery from a period when no motion occurred. This is typically things happening outside my front fence, an area excluded form motion detection. Examples are car going past and being asking if the plate was captured. Or neighbour telling me a "creepy guy" was hanging around on the street.

I'm considering two options:

1) Take a jpeg snapshot once every second to a separate directory, jpegs expire or get deleted by a scheduled task after a couple of days.​

2) Record permanently at a profile set to 1FPS, when motion trigger occurs, it changes to a 15 FPS profile.

The JPEGs were my first thought but after a bit more consideration, it occurs that a 1 FPS video stream might have a lower impact on storage.

Is anyone else doiing something similar? Any tips or pitfalls of one approach over the other?

Cheers.

 

[bp2008]

Rather than using different profiles, I would suggest making clones of the cameras and configuring the clones to record BVR / re-encode to H.264 at 1 FPS. Direct to disk won't work for this.

Assuming you use a fairly long keyframe interval of 15-30 frames or so, the compression should be pretty efficient, much more efficient than jpeg snapshots.

 

[bp2008]

What I do myself is actually run a second BI system that records most of the cameras 24/7. I tend to run high bit rates so a few of the less important cameras aren't on this system, and a few of the cameras are only sub streams. You can do this with a relatively weak system by taking advantage of the "Limit decoding" feature along with hardware acceleration and direct to disk. But you do need a large disk