Trigger recording not working

[adratch@bnsatl.com]

I have three Foscam camera's. I see them in blue Iris. the traffic light is green, the default profile is set and configured to always record however I am not getting any recordings. I can walk in front of the cameras all day and nothing triggers it to record.

Motion sensor is enabled. I have tried with "Object detect/reject" on and off.

I can manually start recording.

I am very new to this software so I assume I must be missing the obvious here.

 

[fenderman]

Is it set to always record or motion? Does it record when you manually trigger the recording?

 

[adratch@bnsatl.com]

On each camera Motion Sensor is enabled. The default profile is set for 24 hours a day. In Record tab "Video is set to "When Triggered" and "create an alert image when triggered" is checked. What else is there to look at?

If I click on the record start/stop icon next to traffic light, it does record

 

[fenderman]

What is your make time? How sensitive is the motion set to? Turn the sliders closer to the left side.

 

[Joblog]

I too have been having triggering problems but they are intermittent. For the most part it works OK, I have tried reducing the make time and changing the sensitivity and contrast settings but still it misses some triggering events (eg the camera is pointing to the garden path, I have received post but the postman delivering it doesn't show in any records, next day I get another letter but this time it is recorded. The sensitivity is set so high now that flowers moving in the breeze cause triggering. I have 6 x Axis normal resolution cameras and 3 x Dahua HD cameras running on a dual core 3.2 ghz desktop PC. Is the issue related to not having enough CPU power to detect the triggering across so many cameras? If I get a new PC to run BI then what is more important, the graphics card or the CPU power? (I have an 8 core file server I could experiment with but the graphics capabilities are a bit basic without any possibility to upgrade).

 

[Joblog]

Sorry, meant to add that the Axis cameras are running at about 8 gps and the dahua's are limited to 10fps.

 

[fenderman]

@Joblog, Welcome to the forum. Please upload a photo of you motion settings. You issue seems to be related to the object/motion detect reject setting. Make sure its UNCHECKED. .
As far as the pc what is your cpu use at idle? what is you cpu use while recordind. You can try reducing use by using direct to disk recording( camera record tab >format) and limiting live view frame rates (general options>other).
If you go with a new pc, CPU is whats important. Get a modern intel, like a third generation ivy bridge or fourth generation haswell I5 or i7 with intel HD onboard graphics. Discrete graphics is of no benefit with blue iris and increases power consumption and add another point of failure.

 

[Joblog]

Hi Fenderman,

Many thanks for such a quick response. I really like this BI software - lots of functionality, allows many camera's and at the price-point it's untouchable.

I checked CPU usage (I'm using a Dell OptiPlex 760 with a dual core 2.8ghz CPU and 4gb RAM) and at idle it's running at 30 to 35%. Nothing's going on in view of the camera's so not possible for me to say what the usage is when triggered and recording.

The object/motion detect option is now unchecked for each camera and all but one is now set to "direct to disk" (I had to leave one with CPU encoding because BI was flipping the image 180 degrees - when I can physically get to the camera I'll fix that). CPU usage has fallen to between 12 and 16%. See attached picture for motion detect settings. I have also dropped the FPS from 30 to 5 for live viewing - most of my live viewing is over a not-so-good broadband connection so getting much more than that is not realistic anyway.

Hopefully that will cure it, but if I do have to swap out the hardware I have a spare Dell Poweredge 2950 (Dual quad core Xeon X5450 @ 3.0ghz with 16gb RAM, a 2TB HDD and dual redundant power supplies) - looking at the relative CPU benchmarks that would appear to be up there with a recent generation i7 processor based PC. I know it's going to be a bit power hungry but is it worth trying? (I don't know who uses desktop PC's for BI and who uses servers). Otherwise I could sell it off and put the money towards something new that's a bit lighter on it's electrical demands.

 

[fenderman]

No problem. I do think you issue was related to object detect...its a common problem.
With direct to disk you need to ensure that the cameras i frame matches the FPS. This is because Direct to disc begins recording on the iframe
From the manual"
"The down-side to using direct-to-disc is that you will not be able to add graphic and time overlays such as the time-stamp. You will need to rely upon the camera to add these itself. Also, recording must begin at the arrival of a key-frame (complete image). If your camera sends these only infrequently, you may miss the beginning of some motion-activated recordings unless you also use the pre-trigger video buffer."
Make sure to also have an adequate pre-trigger buffer.
As far as the server, the xeon you have is actually rated lower than a modern haswell i3
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-4330+@+3.50GHz
I understand that you have two in there though....regardless, it is probably very power hungry. You can check this will a kill-a-watt meter. If you choose to upgrade get a new modern system. I have routinely purchased modern 4th gen haswell i5-i7 for between 300-400 refurbished. I get dell hp or lenovo business systems that are built well and reliable and generally have most of their 3 year next business day warranties available. Your current system seems like its just fine for now, so i would not recommend upgrading at this time. You should test the power consumption on it with a kill-a-watt and report back.

 

[Joblog]

Hi Fenderman,

I checked the Axis 2120 camera's - they sacrifice bandwidth for quality and transmit full frames all the time (MJPG). The Dahua camera's have variable I-frames - mine were set by default to every 2 seconds - the best I could do was to get that down to every second. Whilst tinkering with the camera setting in the Dahua camera's I found that I could flip/rotate the image in the camera before sending to BI so I have done that and now all the camera's are direct to disk. I'll play with the pre-buffering tomorrow to see if I can mitigate the effect of those infrequent I-frames.

I'll put the 2950 up on e-bay and wait for a nice i7 to come along - no rush though, I'll wait to see if what I have is now doing the job OK (but I have two more Axis 2120 camera's to add, hopefully they won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back).

And thanks once again

 

[fenderman]

No problem. Sounds like a good plan.

 

[AD-DO]

I am a new user and am having the same problem. It triggers and I see the frame go red but no recording takes place. I have my motion trigger page setup the same as the attached picture. One difference is that I am trying to save to a cloud based storage. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

 

[fenderman]

First try saving locally to isolate what is causing the lack of recording. What nas are you using?

 

[AD-DO]

I have changed to local HD and it now saves recordings. I am using Box.com, Is there a way to use cloud based storage?

Thanks

 

[Brock]

I have changed to local HD and it now saves recordings. I am using Box.com, Is there a way to use cloud based storage?

Thanks

I'm not familiar with box.com but my recordings go to Onedrive and it works fine. Using Windows 8.1 and as it has Onedrive integrated nicely into it, recordings are automatically in pc's hard drive as well in Onedrive.

 

[AD-DO]

So it sounds like you are recording to the local drive and syncing the data with onedrive?

 

[Brock]

Yes. Once recording is at hard drive, it starts syncing it to Onedrive automatically.

 

[AD-DO]

I thought I could do cloud storage only but its too slow for real time recording. I will have to setup Box-Sync to do the same thing. Thanks for your responses.

 

[wmborah]

My new system will not record after a trigger, even with "Object detect/reject" disabled. It will manual record just fine. I'm not new to Blue Iris, have setup another complete system that works perfectly.

I have three cameras: Foscam FI8918W, FI8910W and a DCS-930L.

None of the cameras will record, even though configuration menu shows Blue Iris has been triggered by motion. Below is one of the configurations:

Any ideas? I'm pulling my hair out over this!!! Thank you very much.

 

[fenderman]

Welcome to the forum. Show us an image of the record tab. Also increase your make time to something about 0.0....