odiggity

i know you can adjust the recoding quality, but I don't want to change that. what I want to do is to be able to retain clips for 120 days of motion detected activity. but for 2 cams i only want to keep 30 days, since they get alot of traffic. I only see recycle setting on the main settings page, not for each individual cam. so i'm assuming that there is no way to change the amount of time to keep for each cam separately.

i have a couple cams that get alot of traffic, and others that get relatively little. I would like to keep 120 days, but the high traffic cams tend to fill up the drive alot faster. is it possible to configure each individual cameras retention setting?

2k3 doesn't do graphics well. do you have the latest drives for video card? What version of directx? what do you have the settings for direct draw overlay set to? if its enabled, turn it of and restart. try to lower the recording quality and frame rate on all cams check to see if it behaves the same when 2 cameras are plugged into any channels. what is the main page set to display? quad? try switching it to scan or single.

do you have a hardware raid controller or a software one? The best performance/protection blend would be raid 5 which is striping with parity. You need at least 3 disks but can have more. the capacity is the sum of all disks minus 1. so if you have (5) 500gb drives, you get 2TB of usable data. with 3 drives it would be 1tb. a single drive's capacity worth of data is used for the redundancy parity. it is striped across all drives. this means that you can lose only 1 drive at a time, or else your data is lost. the array still functions with 1 drive offline and should autoatically repopulate a swapped drive the performace is better than raid 1, worse than raid 0 but not by much here's some instructions to get it to work on windowsxp (its only included on the server products) most of the new sata raid cards will do this too. http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/using_windowsxp_to_make_raid_5_happen/index.html

good point about the cpu bandwidth, i hadn't thought of that. i haven't yet needed to try the backup, but i will give it a shot now. sounds like that would be the easiest way.

what i would like to see is an option for creating either a VCD or DVD right from the playback window within geo ... the nero program, for burning cd's and dvds, has a set of custom API's that you can use on your own app to embed burning capabilities... http://www.nero.com/nero7/enu/SDK_API.html I wonder if you would be able to somehow export a list of files you want to burn from geo, then use the nero API to create a DVD with each chapter being a different video clip. it might not work with the split screen, but it may be good enough. you have to have nero installed already though. i had the cops ask me for a dvd that they could play in court, since they already had a tv/dvd player. turned out they didn't need it as the case never went to trial. but since then i've been thinking it would be useful to have something like this ...

usb is a good idea thanks. you configure geo to use that drive and have nothing on the pc's internal drive?

is anyone using any kind of realtime backup? i wanted to keep a copy of the video away from the geo pc in case the pc is stolen or destroyed. i was thinking about setting the video location to a network drive, but i'm worried about performance. what might work is something that would sync 2 folders every few minutes. then the video could be moved in almost realtime.

i'm trying to configure geo to mail with my gmail acount, but it says that it can't connect to server. i verified that I can ping smtp.gmail.com. the gmail help says that you need to use ssl, but i don't think geo supports that ...

does anyone know if/how you can change the clock format?

how are you playing back originally? I open the playback with F10, then select a camera and a time and hit play. if it is in quad view, it will play back the clips from other cameras as long as the time overlaps with the first camera i started the playback on. Otherwise I get time gaps on the other cameras. so if cam1 has 1 minute event at 12:00 12:10 and 12:15, it will playback the other cams if they have motion that spans these 3 minutes. If cam 2 has events at 12:00 12:05, 12:10, you wouldn't see the 12:05 clip. You can do an advanced search by date and playback everything in a specific range. that will encompass all motion from all cameras. It puts it all into 1 contiguous clip and you can scroll through it. the instant play feature works like this as well. One thing I don't like about the playback, is the delay between clips where you see "Play" in the top left corner. seems that they could make it playback all clips smoothly, without pausing for this.

nevermind, i figured it out. windows movie maker converted it to wmv

I have a recording done with the geo h.264 codec. i want to convert it to mpeg4. can geo do it?

Its been crashing for me quite alot lately. if i were to use the zoom feature to zoom in on one camera, the switch back to the quad view, all other cameras are stopped. I can't seem to get them to restore the feeds. i tried selecting stop, play, etc... no luck. if i double click one of the stopped feeds, it crashes. running webcam v8.0.2 is there any alternative to live remote viewing? also, i notice that in the quad view, the 4 feeds do not take up the entire screen, there is a border around the video. this is what led me to find the crashing problem, as i played around with the zoom button on the bottom ...

i think your problem is with the video card, it may not be able to display video on 2 monitors at the same time. Try playing back any video file and see if it shows up on both monitors. I have an older ATI card withy dual displays and this is the behavior i notice. You shold find out if the video card can do this what I do is to use on of the other display modes that shows more than 1 camera. the larger image is video and shows up pink, while the smaller screens display video at a lower frame rate.