Where did Vitamind.com go?

[Semper Vaporo]

I wish I could really "quantify" the CPU usage, but as a long time user of VDV and now a user of SightHound, I 'think' the CPU usage is 'improved' in SightHound.

I run 4 USB webcams and one network IP cam, all set for 640x480 resolution.

I have always had Task Manager displaying the "Performance" tab and shoved off the bottom of the screen such that only the graphs of CPU usage are showing at the bottom. The VDV/SH window positioned above and "on-top" and covering maybe 5 to 10 percent of the top of the left 2 and a half graphs (the right half of the 3rd graph and all the 4th being fully visible).

Based on my observations (and probably somewhat suspect memory) of what the graphs looked like with VDV and now with SH, I think that I could easily double the number of cameras I am running.

When I was running VDV, I remember the graphs usually showing 60% to 80% CPU 'user' usage and 10% to 15% 'kernel' usage, but not necessarily uniform across the 4 cores. One core (and it varied which one it was) would always be much higher than the others. Of course there were random excursions to higher usage in each graph, independent of the other graphs, depending on what was happening in the 5 scenes of the cameras. There would also be periodic increases in all 4 graphs every few minutes as VDV did housekeeping to delete old video (I assume); this would last for maybe 10 to 20 seconds and then everything would revert to the normal squiggly lines around 60% to 80%. Periodically the core that was running closer to 80% would drop back to around 60% and some other core would be running at the higher percentage. I never really saw that transition occur, I would just note a particular core was the "busy" one and later notice that it was one of the others. The same would be true in regard to the 'kernel' usage.

Now, using SH, I am seeing a more uniform distribution of work, with all 4 CPU's showing 50% 'user' usage. But the 'kernel' usage is a bit higher than with VDV, with two cores running at 5% and two at closer to 20%. Right at this moment the 'kernel' usage seems to be evenly distributed between cores 3 and 4, but that will change sometime and it will be some other combination of which two are the busier ones.

The particular computer I am using now (an HP P7-1010) has an AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 645 processor running at 3.1 GHz, with 6GB of RAM. The "Windows Experience Index" for the overall machine is rather poor, but it is probably because the display hardware is the bottle neck. The processor and memory scores are both 7.2, and the Primary hard disk is 5.9, and those are not bad. I think the hard drive speed is adequate. But the Graphics and Gaming Graphics scores are 3.4 and 4.9, respectively and those are poor (I think). I have no idea if a better display card would improve things for VDV/SH or not.

(You can find this info by clicking "Start" and then right-click "Computer" and select "Properties". This will get you the info page that shows the overall score near the center of the page. Click the "Windows Experience Index" link next to that score to get the details.)

[Semper Vaporo]

Addendum... I should probably point out that although I think "I" could double the number of cameras I am running, that doesn't mean that SH is twice as fast. I had some room for expansion to begin with and could have added more cameras anyway. I am thinking I could have added 3 more without problems, but not 5 more. Now I think I could add 5 more without major problems, but that is only 2 more than what I COULD have done with VDV.

As with VDV, the resolution and frame rate for each camera has a lot to do with workload.

Also, I think (again based on my fuzzy memory of VDV operation), SH is better at handling dark scenes with less CPU usage. On my system, night time CPU usage was always higher than daytime usage. Dark scenes tend to have more video 'noise' (snow?) than bright scenes and it appears to me that SightHound is better at filtering that out, or at least not being busy because of it.

[falcon999]

well i went ahead and emailed them to get a pro license upgrade from my vit d pro box, and i'm hopeful, plus I want to support the app so that i can see where they are go with some more money and support.

i have blue iris at work and it's ok, but i think there is room for improvement.

[ryan]

Hi falcon999,

Thanks for your interest in upgrading, I'll check our support box after I finish this post and take care of whatever issue you may be having with the upgrade.

As far as CPU is concerned there is unfortunately a bit of a fixed cost for encoding and decoding video, this isn't something we can push too many improvements on (certainly not double). In Sighthound we switch our encoding format to h264 from mpeg4, with the goal of keeping CPU usage the same for an equivalent camera feed, and we were able to hit this. That being said, CPUs themselves have become much faster, so your Haswell i7 should likely be able to handle significantly more cameras, depending on resolution. Also note that disk speed and ram become important with that many cameras as well.

Anecdotally, we have a user with an off the shelf mac mini (not sure if it is the 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 or the 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7) recording from 10-12 cameras at 1024x768 without trouble. In the office we have the upgraded mac mini (2.6GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, non Haswell) recording from 11 cameras at a variety of resolutions, some at 640x480, one at 1920x1080, which is still useable as (and is) someone's work machine, and could certainly handle more cameras.

Hope that helps,
- ryan

[falcon999]

i'm currently using blue iris on a quad core q6600 at the office at 1080p, 2mp cameras but i lowered the framerate down to 10 fps, that seems to be helping, so i'm optimistic that the new and improved vit d can do it, all of the cameras that i am going to be going through the vit d machine are currently analog but i'm slowly moving everything to ip, and i have already done that at the office. I have a dvr that streams mp4 to vitd

[ryan]

Hi everyone,

Timestamps will be in the next release of Sighthound Video. If anyone has a licensed version of Sighthound Video and would like to try out a an early build send me a message here or email me, ryan@, and I'll be happy to get you one.