I've attached two screenshots.
One is setup as a rule that SAVES VIDEO TO FILE when people walk anywhere in the room
One is setup as a rule that SEND ME AN EMAIL when people walk anywhere in the room
The problem is that the video is recording 24/7 even with no motion at all in a living room. The Email rule only emails me when I walk in there while testing it.
Both rules are set up exactly the same way except for the "If Seen" part of the rule. Also, they are both checked as enabled (can't see that in the screen shot) and turned on.
What could I possibly be doing wrong?
PS - I pointed my camera at the ceiling in the screen shots for security reasons. My little boring living room in my 3 bedroom house in Nashville is precious to me, lol.
Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detection
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nomaam - Posts: 7
- Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2015 2:24 am
Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detection
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Semper Vaporo - Posts: 331
- Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 11:51 am
Re: Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detect
Sighthound records EVERYTHING to disk in a series of contiguous files (of about 15 minutes duration each) and when one of your rules is met due to motion, then a database is updated to point into those files about 5 seconds before the motion was detected to about 15 seconds after. This way, you can see a few seconds of what happened before the motion was actually determined to have occurred. Otherwise, all you would see is the person just "there" in the middle of the room and not know if they came from the left, right, fell in from the ceiling or popped up through a trap door in the floor, or maybe just beamed-in from the transporter room on the Enterprise.
After 48 hours (or whatever number of hours YOU set in the "Tools/Options|Storage" menu selection) all the data that is outside of the Start and End times in the database are deleted to free up space in the storage system for more video. If YOUR selected allocation of space on the storage system gets full (same menu selection), then the oldest saved-by-rule video will also get deleted to make room for more.
You can set the storage time to just 1 hour if you wish.
I have mine set to 720 hours (30 days) so that if someone is seen on my front porch while I am off gallivanting the world for 3 weeks, I can look at the non-rule saved video from other cameras to see where that person came from (car parked in street or driveway, or if they walked up from somewhere else). I don't want to "save by rule" all the traffic on my street or even in my driveway (people use it to turn around a lot!) nor all the cars that park in front of my house (family across the street parks there and he and the kids come and go at all hours of the day and night) so I have no rule to save that video from the cameras that face the street, but by saving all video for an extended time, when someone actually comes onto my porch, I can see what has happened elsewhere (both before and after).
Sighthound is very good at keeping the video file space all cleaned up so there is plenty of room for more. And if, perhaps, some video that you don't want to be saved at all, even for a moment, you have the option of deleting it within the "Search" mode of Sighthound.
After 48 hours (or whatever number of hours YOU set in the "Tools/Options|Storage" menu selection) all the data that is outside of the Start and End times in the database are deleted to free up space in the storage system for more video. If YOUR selected allocation of space on the storage system gets full (same menu selection), then the oldest saved-by-rule video will also get deleted to make room for more.
You can set the storage time to just 1 hour if you wish.
I have mine set to 720 hours (30 days) so that if someone is seen on my front porch while I am off gallivanting the world for 3 weeks, I can look at the non-rule saved video from other cameras to see where that person came from (car parked in street or driveway, or if they walked up from somewhere else). I don't want to "save by rule" all the traffic on my street or even in my driveway (people use it to turn around a lot!) nor all the cars that park in front of my house (family across the street parks there and he and the kids come and go at all hours of the day and night) so I have no rule to save that video from the cameras that face the street, but by saving all video for an extended time, when someone actually comes onto my porch, I can see what has happened elsewhere (both before and after).
Sighthound is very good at keeping the video file space all cleaned up so there is plenty of room for more. And if, perhaps, some video that you don't want to be saved at all, even for a moment, you have the option of deleting it within the "Search" mode of Sighthound.
Semper Vaporo,
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nomaam - Posts: 7
- Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2015 2:24 am
Re: Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detect
I am not sure if I am confused or if I just asked the question wrong, but I only want video saved when motion is detected. I don't want 1 hour or 24 hours or 30 days worth of my living room couch just sitting there not moving. That is not valuable to me. At all. And it is unnecessarily taxing on a hard drive on my machine. I don't see the point in that.
Can't I set this thing up to do what I need to do? It seems very straightforward.
Can't I set this thing up to do what I need to do? It seems very straightforward.
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Semper Vaporo - Posts: 331
- Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 11:51 am
Re: Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detect
I recognize your feelings that saving this useless data is really a waste of something, no matter how short the time is that it exists. I do commiserate with you! But my consternation is even deeper... just think of how many electrons have been tossed around in the computer, just comparing one frame of data with the next frame of data to see if anything changed! That absolutely boggles my mind. Over and over, at a minimum of 10 times per second each frame of the image is compared to the next. I don't know the inner workings of Sighthound, but I have written motion detection software and have some feeling for what goes on "inside". It is not trivial; each frame must be normalized for brightness/contrast, then the numeric value for each pixel in one frame must be subtracted from the same pixel in the next "normalized" frame and the result tested for some threshold so that noise is ignored. The row and column number of that pixel must be tested against the highest and lowest row and/or column number of all the other "above threshold" pixels to see if it is the top, bottom, left or right edge of an object or part of one already being processed. This "difference frame" is then also compared to the next one to see of any of those "edge" row and/or column numbers have changed and again a threshold applied to ignore minor variations, etc. That "difference in differences" frame is then compared to another one, again applying a threshold of some sort so that only something that is truly moving can be monitored for how far it has moved. What a waste of good electrons if all the differences are nil! But if it didn't do this constantly, when something does move, how would it know? And how would it then be able to apply the rules for detecting if that motion met the criteria of the rule to know whether to save it or not?
The time to store the video on the harddrive is miniscule compared to the amount of work the CPU is doing. The time to remove the video clips that are not marked as "saved by rule" is also miniscule compared to all that processing time just deciding that it should not be kept. And if it didn't save all the data, how would it be able to show 5 seconds of video prior to the detected motion?
It is a "Waste" to store all that video of the davenport just sitting there, I agree. But considering what went into deciding that it is just sitting there, the time spent to store and later delete the video is trivial, and not something to worry about. Set the retention time to one hour and Sighthound will be fat, dumb and happy to delete this useless video of an idle couch when it gets around to it and you need never think about it. And if the couch is not prancing around the room when you ain't looking, Sighthound won't list anything in the "Search" mode and the data on disk will disappear soon enough.
Granted, there is some wear and tear on the disk writing and then deleting the data, but I am running 6 cameras on my dedicated surveillance system and see the drive light blink a few times every second or two. But watching the drive light on the PC on which I am writing this, the light is blinking just as often while Winders and Internet Explorer are off doing whatever they do when I am scratching my noggin trying to write something useful (and not boring).
The time to store the video on the harddrive is miniscule compared to the amount of work the CPU is doing. The time to remove the video clips that are not marked as "saved by rule" is also miniscule compared to all that processing time just deciding that it should not be kept. And if it didn't save all the data, how would it be able to show 5 seconds of video prior to the detected motion?
It is a "Waste" to store all that video of the davenport just sitting there, I agree. But considering what went into deciding that it is just sitting there, the time spent to store and later delete the video is trivial, and not something to worry about. Set the retention time to one hour and Sighthound will be fat, dumb and happy to delete this useless video of an idle couch when it gets around to it and you need never think about it. And if the couch is not prancing around the room when you ain't looking, Sighthound won't list anything in the "Search" mode and the data on disk will disappear soon enough.
Granted, there is some wear and tear on the disk writing and then deleting the data, but I am running 6 cameras on my dedicated surveillance system and see the drive light blink a few times every second or two. But watching the drive light on the PC on which I am writing this, the light is blinking just as often while Winders and Internet Explorer are off doing whatever they do when I am scratching my noggin trying to write something useful (and not boring).
Semper Vaporo,
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Devin - Posts: 719
- Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2014 5:48 pm
Re: Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detect
Hi nomaam,
Semper already did a great job of describing how video is managed, though if you'd like additional information on how long video is saved, how to manage disk space, and how video clips are divided up, please see this article: https://www.sighthound.com/support/managing-your-video
The way Sighthound Video is built requires all video to be temporarily written to your machine, so it is currently not possible to only write video that matches your rules.
Regards,
-Devin
Semper already did a great job of describing how video is managed, though if you'd like additional information on how long video is saved, how to manage disk space, and how video clips are divided up, please see this article: https://www.sighthound.com/support/managing-your-video
The way Sighthound Video is built requires all video to be temporarily written to your machine, so it is currently not possible to only write video that matches your rules.
Regards,
-Devin
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evansgo - Posts: 3
- Joined: Tue Mar 10, 2015 3:25 pm
Re: Recording never stops - I only want it for motion detect
Hiya,
I'd just like to add to this if I may. I also would much prefer it if nothing was constantly saved as I was going to use an ssd for this, but am a little concerned about slowly but surely killing it because of all the writes (no idea if this is likely or not but my perception is that it is). So is it not possible to use RAM for the temp rolling capture and literally just dump it if there is no movement and if there is then save it to disk which would have all the benefits and non of the drawbacks (obviously still allow constant storage as an option for this who would prefer this)?
Gareth
I'd just like to add to this if I may. I also would much prefer it if nothing was constantly saved as I was going to use an ssd for this, but am a little concerned about slowly but surely killing it because of all the writes (no idea if this is likely or not but my perception is that it is). So is it not possible to use RAM for the temp rolling capture and literally just dump it if there is no movement and if there is then save it to disk which would have all the benefits and non of the drawbacks (obviously still allow constant storage as an option for this who would prefer this)?
Gareth