JBlitzen

I'm working with an animal shelter that would like a video record of behavioral tests on dogs. They'd like video recording software that can generate as close as possible to one video per one or more dogs. What they don't want is 10 different video files for each dog, due to short periods when the dog and tester are out of the room or holding still. Their current software causes this problem, as it only permits a 10 second wait after every motion event before it closes a file. It looks like we could use XProtect's post-recording delay period to specify that a video file shouldn't be closed until there have been, say, 4 minutes of nonmotion, which perhaps the file could speed through at accelerated time. Do I understand that right? In other words, rather than: File 1: 5 seconds of nonmotion 20 seconds of motion 10 seconds of nonmotion File 2 (same test): 5 seconds of nonmotion 47 seconds of motion 10 seconds of nonmotion Could we use XProtect to automatically generate: File 1: X seconds of nonmotion 20 seconds of motion 36 seconds of nonmotion 47 seconds of motion X seconds of nonmotion If XProtect can't do it, is there other cheap software that could?

I don't understand how a continuous recording would help. That would generate a single 24-hour (though compressed at times) file. What we want is, in a day where there may be 5 temperament tests, for there to be somewhere between 1 and 5 (or maybe a few more) video files on disk, with timestamps roughly correlating to those tests. I can define, to you guys, an ideal "file" as being a record of motion in that room which begins after more than 3 minutes of nonmotion since the prior file. That would give us roughly the file breakdown that would be most useful to our volunteer staff and thus to the dogs and potential adopters. It wouldn't be precisely perfect, there might be one test broken up into two files, or two or three tests on the same file, but it'd be very close. Far closer than Vitamin D can get with its fixed 10-second delay rule. What I'm wondering is whether such a definition can be made within XProtect, or maybe within any other software.

Hm. We want all the motion in the room to be recorded and stored permanently. The problem is that Vitamin D breaks up videos after a 10 second pause in motion, which can produce ten different files that document the same test, causing problems in exporting a single video of that test. I'm just wondering if XProtect's post-record delay feature can extend that 10 second trigger to, say, a minute or two, and thus limit the... file spread... of a single test. One file/video covering three tests is okay, but five files/videos covering one test is a problem, and not currently surmountable with Vitamin D. Or, is there some other feature common in this type of software that will let us modify the file close triggers for a video, to accomplish the same thing?

Thanks. Exporting would help with the filenames, but it would place a large burden on the volunteer staff. If the video files are reasonably long, then it shouldn't be too difficult for volunteers to work back through them and find the right file if there's a problem several months down the line.

(Cliff's notes: single camera - Axis M1011, need software that can run as a service, accept custom delay settings for determining when to stop recording one event, and name the generated files something that non-tech users can easily figure out.) I'm working with a nonprofit group that assists with, among other things, animal adoptions. As part of the intake process for dogs, they test the dog's temperament, its behavior with humans. They would like to keep a video record of each dog's temperament test, to assist with training, to show the dog off to potential adopters, and partly for liability reasons. This may be the only video record kept of each dog that passes through the facility. They have an Axis M1011 camera that they've set up in the testing room, pointed toward the testing area. What they would like to have is a piece of software sitting on a server somewhere on the same network, listening to that camera, and recording and saving any motion within the camera's viewing area. The videos need to be saved to disk, in a manner which somewhat facilitates easy lookup at a future point. They've tried Vitamin D Video, but the filenames it generates are practically useless for correlating to actual temperament tests. The timestamps are somewhat better, but the software lacks any mechanism whatsoever for delimiting a "test", and thus can produce several files over the course of one test. It offers no configuration option whatsoever for defining the delay after motion at which point the recording is stopped, and thus any pause of 10 seconds or more will end one file and potentially begin another one. If I could crank that delay up somehow, that problem would be surmountable. For the file output, Vitamin D can export videos to file just fine, and produce great filenames that non-tech users can easily understand. Unfortunately, that would have to be done once for every single file, which could easily be dozens or hundreds per day. That's not acceptable. The in-software video browser is nice, but it only accesses videos within the active data loop. Once the videos exceed 150 gigabytes (over, say, 3 months), Vitamin D will start deleting the older ones. Even if we've backed them up somewhere else, the in-software browser will no longer be able to view them. VDV also can't run as a service, which means we'd have to log on to the server as a user every time the server's rebooted, otherwise our video record stops getting maintained. On the other hand, Vitamin D has great capabilities regarding blocking out a small area within the camera's viewable area, and creating methods of querying the videos by those blocked areas. That's a cool capability, but it's not one that we'd use. So, I'm just looking for a cheap or free software solution that we can install on a server, preferrably as a service, which allows us to: 1. Create an easily browsed file for each motion event, ideally through well-named files or even user-definable filenames. 2. Define a motion event in terms of "non-motion" time before and after the event. So, a 5 second pause resulting in a new video would be bad. But, a 45 second pause would probably work okay, and a 3 minute pause would be perfectly fine. Typical tests are maybe ten minutes long, with several 30-second long out-of-the-room pauses, but usually with several minutes between each dog's test. 3. Preferrably run as a service. Any idea what would work well for us? The dogs thank you in advance.