Multi cam setup, one cam taking too much storage space

djh_wolf

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Hi all.

I've searched and failed I'm afraid. Had the setup for quite a while and I'll be the first to admit that there was a lot of poking around in the dark and I couldn't really explain to anyone properly how I managed to get the cam settings just right. I managed to get the system set up so that my 1TB drive gave around 3 weeks of recording at an acceptable quality using the following basic setup. If I had to set this up again from scratch, I'd struggle. (federman helped me get at least one of these cams recognised in BI way back...). I recall something about using the cam's own web admin pages to alter bitrates and also altering the recording settings in BI.

Original:
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Setup - 8 cams
5 outdoor cams record 24/7
3 indoor ones only record during motion
Around a month of recording, fine

'Blip':
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One of the cams ("Ram") stopped recording fairly recently, god knows why, and when I messed about with it I couldn't for the life of me sort it, Which meant that instead, I re-added the camera. In hindsight I believe it was a glitch in a BI update because I also noticed a few other issues which were then reported and fixed.

Current:
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After doing this, the storage space for this "Ram" camera is huge. My overall storage time has now been reduced to a about a week (if that) due to this.


Could someone please give me a basic idea on how to :

1) add a cam (I've already got them added, so that's not so much of an issue)
2) Alter the recording quality to something acceptable - is this via the cam's own page, BI, or both ..? It really confused me. (this is probably the part I struggle with the most, I've tried messing with various settings and can't seem to restore it back to how it was before without using a TONNE of space).
3) Visually check to see whether the recording looks ok?


I'm sorry that this is probably quite a basic question, but I've trouble-shooted quite a bit and I'm embarrassingly not getting anywhere fast.



For reference, here's a few pics:




Main screen:

1588409297313.png



One outside cam, recording 24/7:
1588409377574.png

A rough idea of the recording size (up to about 200MB / hour):
1588409472610.png


A 2nd outdoor 24/7 cam:
1588409532228.png

Again, a rough idea of the recording size (again up to about 250MB / hour):
1588409607510.png

The 'problem' cam:
1588409652143.png
Recording space, gigabytes / hour:
1588409682152.png


It's driving me up the wall. Could anyone please shed some light? Much appreciated ! = )
 

pc750

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The problem camera is set to MJPEG recording format. It should be H.264 or H.265 if it is available in the settings of the camera. Without knowing what your hardware is, if your cameras are the same brand as your recorder some settings can be changed at the recorder. If they are different brands probably best to change the info in the camera.
Camera resolution will depend on what MP your cameras are. The higher quality the camera the more storage it will require
Try CBR (constant bit rate) v VBR (variable bit rate) this may help with limiting bandwidth used for recording and remote monitoring.
 
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djh_wolf

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Thanks for the reply. It definitely hasn't always been that way, but I'm not sure how to get it back.

Here are the current settings:
1588423713787.png

1588423802369.png

It is a cheap 'n' nasty cam, but at some point this worked just fine with smaller file sizes. Any ideas why ? The settings page doesn't seem to make any noticeable differences.
 

pc750

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Without having a similar cam to browse through. I would suggest if you have another of the same model cam, login to it and have a look at the settings to compare with this one. Not sure if they have the ability to export/save config files, but that may be another way to resolve the issue by importing a good config from another cam.
 

djh_wolf

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No can do. Its actually some cheap ass can that was given to me for free by a neighbour (it was a spare can from hin cheap dvr system. Not even sure how the hell it ended up getting recognised in bi, because it was a while ago now and if I try to re-add from scratch I can't get it recognised.

The only reason I can use it now is because I have the config saved.

I have a feeling that I must have actually used software encoding for this one and relied on h2xx for the rest.

Thanks for the replies. Looks like I may have accidentally wasted everyones' time by being old and confused. Sorry = p
 

IAmATeaf

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What options do you have under video type? Another thing to check are the settings under profile, that could also be setting the video type?
 
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