Hourly gaps in recording

[Gilera]

I have recently discovered a weird thing happening where 2 out of my 5 cameras show a 6 second gap in the recordings every hour.
I am running Blue Iris in a VM under Proxmox.
The 2 cameras in question happen to both be my Dahua 5442 cameras. This may be just a coincidence. The 3 other cameras are all different - 1 is a different model Dahua.
The gaps occur on one camera at 46 minutes and 47 seconds past the hour then the other one shortly after at 47 minutes and 56 seconds past the hour. Both have a gap of about 6 seconds and then start recording again.
All recordings go directly to an attached HDD which is passed through to the Windows VM. Continuous recording with oldest recordings automatically being deleted.
The gaps occur in both the UI3 and the console but strangely they only show up in the UI3 timeline as gaps. The console timeline is continuous but when it plays past that time the footage is missing for those 6 seconds.
I have BI logs turned on but nothing shows at those times.
I'm on Version 5.9.8.5

Any ideas what might be causing this?

 

[jaydeel]

Database Compact/reindex actions might explain this (they typically execute for only a few seconds, and recording is paused during the operator), but they don't typically run hourly, and are not camera-specific. Furthermore, they insert a 'reindexing' entry into the messages log.

If you have the Compact/reindex action checked on the Settings > Storage tab, you might try disabling it as an experiment.

The Database Compact/reindex action can be issued on-demand via an HTTP interface command (see below). Executing this command on a schedule is the only way I can think of for performing it hourly. Say via Task Scheduler, or an action set in Blue Iris settings > Schedule > Execute action set each X minutes.

/admin?db=rebuild, compact, maintain, status Initiates the specified database operation.

 

[Gilera]

Thanks. I checked the compact/reindex setting and it is set to 2:00am daily (?default) which it seems to be doing according to the logs. It seems that it is something else. I checked again this morning and the behaviour continues. It seemed to be a few seconds later in the hour today so possibly not exactly every hour, but a second or two off.

Could this be a camera side/connection issue? If the camera stream stops I thought it comes up with a message on that cameras viewer in BI. Does lost stream get logged in BI logs?

 

[jaydeel]

Could this be a camera side/connection issue? If the camera stream stops I thought it comes up with a message on that cameras viewer in BI. Does lost stream get logged in BI logs?

A 'Signal: network retry|Failed to connect|restored' series of messages are posted the BI logfile when a camera toggles off- then on-line.

 

[Gilera]

Thanks - well there were definitely no entries in the logs within 2-3 minutes either side of the event that I checked this morning. I guess that means that it is not camera or network related.

 

[Bruce_H]

Is it possible that something is overloading the network or the Promax VM at that time and preventing the signal from the camera from reaching the BI server, not sure if this type of thing would trigger a log event or not!

 

[Gilera]

I have been told that this can occur when BI transitions to a new recording file. I have set "Combine or cut video" to 1 hour or 3GB so the time interval would be right. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[Alaska Country]

Have the same BI issue with 2 out of 28 Dahua cameras both on BI and UI3. The other 26 do not have this video void issue.

BI version 5.9.9.59 x64

Camera 1 - 5849T1-ASE Blank space at 4:56:05 PM to 4:56:35 PM
Repeats each hour at the same time with the same 30 second blank.

Camera 2 - 5242 H Z6E Blank space at 4:56:47 PM to 4:57:02 PM
Repeats each hour at the same time with the same 15 second blank.

Cameras set up for "Combine or cut video each: 1 hr"

 

[Vettester]

I have been told that this can occur when BI transitions to a new recording file. I have set "Combine or cut video" to 1 hour or 3GB so the time interval would be right. Can anyone confirm this?

According to the help file:

"The Cut video when triggered with break time option can be used with continuous recording such that each new file created always begins with a trigger event. The cut will occur only if there’s been at least a specified amount of time where the camera remained in a non-triggered state (a break time)."

This basically means that if an alert was triggered prior to the end of the cut time the new file will not be created until the event is compete. In the screenshot below you can see that there are two files that were not created exactly at the top of the hour. I can confirmed that both of these instances there were events triggered at the end of the previous hour. You can also see that the majority of the files are over 3GB. I have my "Combine or cut video" set to 1 hour or 6GB and am not having any issues on any of my cameras. I'm on version 5.9.9.65 x64.

 

[Tinman]

I was having this exact issue with my 180 cam. I only specified 4GB and that wasn't enough. Changed it to 6GB and it has been perfect just like Vettester's above. As you can see, sometime the clips came in under 4GB, but some not.

 

[Gilera]

Thanks everyone. I checked the clips tab and sure enough a new clip was being created for those 2 cameras at the exact time of their hourly outage. The clip size at time of transition was 2.92GB which is slightly less than the 3GB threshold I set, but close to it I guess. A new clip runs from the approx 47 minutes past the hour when the outages occur to the end of the hour. These clips are about 700MB so I guess the size would have ended up over 3GB for the full hour. I changed one of the cameras to a 4GB threshold an hour ago and sure enough the gap seems to have disappeared for that camera. The fact that they both happen to be Dahua 5442 would stem from the fact that these 2 are the highest definition of my cams and are on the exact same settings except one is on the H254 high profile and one is on the H264 base profile. This may account for the slight time difference in cutoff between the 2 cams (which also seems to indicate there is actually very little size difference between the high and base profiles). The other cams are on lower settings and so they are the only 2 which would exceed the 3GB clip size in the hour.

So, in conclusion it seems that Blue Iris creates a gap in recording when transitioning to a new clip if you exceed the set size threshold for a clip but not the duration (1 hour)?