Feature suggestion - Animated recording thumbnails

[alkizmo]

I've trialed Blue Iris twice until purchasing it this morning.
During my trial time, I also tried several free softwares, most of which were worth what I paid for (nothing), but there was one feature from a well meaning programmer that I loved and I couldn't find anywhere else (I don't know if I am allowed to talk about other softwares here).

Anyhow, when I would browse through the recordings of my cameras, the thumbnail list would be animated gifs. This allowed me to quickly scan through my recordings and spot the ones that interested me.

Most people might not need that feature, but my camera detects a lot tree-shadow activity which I can't filter out no matter what. So a lot of my recordings are just shadows dancing on a windy day. The animated gifs help me spot actual vehicule/people passing through.

Anyway, I'm glad to be part of this community. I took about 2 months to settle with Blue Iris, frankly I regret not doing so from the very beginning.

 

[fenderman]

Welcome to the forum..you can take about any software you like, there is no censorship here...
You can send a feature request to the developer as he does not monitor this site.
http://blueirissoftware.com/contact/

 

[alkizmo]

Welcome to the forum..you can take about any software you like, there is no censorship here...
You can send a feature request to the developer as he does not monitor this site.
http://blueirissoftware.com/contact/

Oh, yeah I will

Credit is due where it is due: Contacam
I loved it, but I had to stop using it because it only supported MJPEG. H264 cameras required transcoding from VLC.
My CPU got murdered by the task when I added a 3MP camera.

 

[bp2008]

Hello alkizmo. I agree this would be a very handy feature. I have previously considered implementing something similar in my custom web interface for Blue Iris (see my signature below for a link).

Weeks before I made the first public release of my UI2 page, I experimented with letting the user expand the clip list to reveal multiple thumbnails for each clip. But it turned out that Blue Iris can't deliver frames fast enough to be satisfactory so I had to abandon the feature. For any given frame request, Blue Iris has to open the clip and seek to the appropriate position. This wouldn't be so bad if Blue Iris could just decode the frame you want and return it. But the way modern videos are encoded, each frame relies on the frame before. So Blue Iris (or any video player, really) has to find the nearest keyframe and decode every frame from there to the one you wanted to see. This is expensive for the CPU, and gets out of control if you are trying to play back 5 or 10 different clips at a time. It doesn't help that only a thumbnail is being shown. Blue Iris still has to do the complete decoding job and then scale the image down to thumbnail size.

The only way it would be practical to animate multiple clips at once is if Blue Iris was to generate the animations at the time of recording and store them on disk for easy retrieval. Animated GIFs would work, but that is a stone-age solution, relatively speaking. Tiny h264/mp4 video clips would be far more efficient and they could be embedded in any modern browser with html5 video tags, no plugins required. I don't see this being a priority for the Blue Iris developer, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

That said, I could easily change UI2 so the clip thumbnail animates while you are moused over the clip. That should not overload the CPU on the Blue Iris server. The only reason I did not do this months ago is it didn't seem like a worthwhile use of my time. Nobody wants to watch a clip play in a postage stamp when they literally just have to click once to see it in large size with almost no added delay.

 

[alkizmo]

Thanks for replying, this community is great :nuts:

The only way it would be practical to animate multiple clips at once is if Blue Iris was to generate the animations at the time of recording and store them on disk for easy retrieval. Animated GIFs would work, but that is a stone-age solution, relatively speaking.

That's actually how it was done with Contacam. Each event recording generated a gif that goes with the clip. I had in mind that the "Alert" sidebar in Blue Iris could use GIFs instead of snapshots.

Nobody wants to watch a clip play in a postage stamp when they literally just have to click once to see it in large size with almost no added delay.

Then I have another suggestion for the thumbnails without the need for animation: Can the alert thumbnails be generated a bit later? Based either on the peak of the level of motion or based on the "MAKE time" setting?

When I was trying out iSpy, I would get thumbnails/snapshots of the alerts that were very informative.
If a car drove across the view of the camera, the thumbnail would have the car placed in the center (Peak of motion detection).
If someone walked to my door (where the camera is located), the thumbnail would show the person being right in front of the camera (Peak of motion).

In Blue Iris, the alert thumbnail seems to be generated from the first frame where motion is detected, even before the recording begins.
It isn't a problem for indoor cameras in small rooms, as objects/people tend to move in frame pretty quickly, but for outdoor, objects can be a good 100 feet or more from the camera and slowly move into view.
When a delivery van stops in front of my house, the thumbnail will show the van cut off in half as it just appears in the frame.
When someone comes to my door, the thumbnail will show that person as they first appear down the street, which doesn't stand out from all other thumbnails of people walking by my house, but not going to the door.

 

[bp2008]

Alerts appear in the list before they are even finished recording, so I bet that is why the thumbnail is from the start of the motion. Perhaps the the Blue Iris developer could have that thumbnail be replaced by one from the peak of motion as soon as the trigger is ended. You'd have to email and ask.