Need help selecting the right software for our single camera

[JBlitzen 0]

(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.