Playback of snapshots stored in PIC files by HIKVISION cams

[ethos 0]

My system is based on HIKVISION 2CD3132 cams, NAS storage on Ubuntu, and iVMS4200.

 

Recording and remote playback of videos is working (although there are still some playback issues which i will address elsewhere.)

 

One of the HIKVISION cameras is set up for continuous snapshot recording as a way to provide an overview of daily sales in my restaurant. The idea is to be able to rapidly review the whole day's business activity by flipping through snapshots taken at 1 minute intervals, at the same time i need a high resolution video recorded at 2FPS to review detail.

 

The snapshots are being recorded fine but they are stored as multiple images in large .PIC files instead of separate images, and they don't show up in the Remote Playback section of iVMS4200.

 

This multiple image PICT file format isn't supported by popular media viewing software, in fact, so far i have not been able to find anything that can view them! Quicktime can open the files but only shows one image.

 

Has anyone here had a similar experience?

 

Does anyone know how to view these snapshots? in iVMS4200 or elsewhere?

or how to extract the snapshots from the PIC files?

 

Thanks for sharing!

.

[Brenning 0]

I'll second this as I have also just stumbled across this problem...

[Desertsweeper 0]

Did anyone ever solve this? I find it amazing that it is just not possible to see the snapshots. Why bother offering the option of creating them...

[jal25 0]

I gave up and wrote some perl to do it:

 

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Splits a ".pic" file created by a Hikvision camera
# into single jpeg files

if (! (${file}=$ARGV[0]) ) {
 print "Usage: $0 filename\n"; exit 1;
}

open FILE, ${file};
while (<FILE>){
${jpeg} .= $_;
}
close ${file};

${index}=0;
while ( index(${jpeg}, "\xFF\xD8") != -1  ) {
 $start = index(${jpeg}, "\xFF\xD8");
 $end = index(${jpeg}, "\xFF\xD9");

 ${singlejpeg} = substr(${jpeg}, $start, $end);
 ${jpeg} = substr(${jpeg}, $end+1);
 open (OUTFILE, ">${file}_${index}.jpg");
 print OUTFILE ${singlejpeg};
 close OUTFILE;
 ${index}++;
}