Matt,
There was an update to 8.3.1, but the corruption appeared about two months later. The live images appear on the screen just fine. This has happened to two machines so far, both running 8.3.1.
Interesting that you said that about Geovision support, because I have contacted them many times in the past, and they have been very helpful in answering design, and configuration questions, BUT - when it came to this issue, I never heard back from them. Two emails about the problems (one for each machine that had the issue - the second email sounded a bit more urgent I am sure). This has left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. Both machines are installed in pretty upstanding businesses and each install was sold for over $15k - so needless to say - I wanted an answer to what might have caused this problem. (And so did my customers!)
Anyway,
I have already considered Imaging all of my client's PC's just in case something crashed or went crazy - and I'm going to implement this strategy soon - just need to get to it. I have over 30 systems out there - and that's a lot of imaging.
I do however keep 2 complete 1480 systems on the shelf for when someone's system goes down. I can just show up and swap out systems and video drives, do a FBR and in less than 2 hours they are back up and running. Unfortunate that this is a necessary step to keep your business going - but most of the issues that create the need for this are Windows related and not Geovision.
I spent about 5 hours the first time that the corrupt video files appeared - just trying to get the footage repaired. I did a chkdsk - found no errors. I did a seatools repair - found no errors. Tried the database restore, looked like it saw all of the files, but the player wouldn't play them, and sometimes crashed when I clicked on the file. Other times, it would come up with a ? next to the time of day (of the file) and not play the file.
VERY DISSAPOINTING that I can't get a response from GEO, on how or why this would happen. I'm supprised that I didn't loose $30k worth of clients because of this. How embarrasing! At least the footage that was attempted to play was not for a personal injury, or I probably would have been sued, because once again - one of these was a brand new system with less than 10 days of footage on it.