Problem with cameras

[Semper Vaporo]

I am running VDV (1.4.1 build 6064)on an HP Pavllion DV-7 Laptop PC with an AMD Phenom (TM) II N830 Triple-Core Processor, 2.1GHz, 4GB memory and two 320GB hard-drives. Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (it is not connected to the Internet to get updates so the latest update was done by HP as part of their load-set and it has a date of 5/26/2010). I have disabled the anti-malware programs and the firewall to free up resources (it is not connected to anything but cameras so there is little need for those functions).

I have been using 5 cameras, 4 in use 24/7 and one only when I am away from home. They are an odd assortment of inexpensive web cams and one higher end IP cam.

"West" - TRENDnet TV-IP 400W (Wireless is shut off and it is connected via hardwire through a stand-alone router).

"North" - 'Next Products' "Smart Webcam" which the package lists as: "Color, 3 mega pixels, 800x600, High speed USB 2.0" It is a poor camera as it smears motion and has NO low light sensitivity and poor automatic brightness control (washes out in sunlight, but a sunglasses lens over it helps a wee bit). Connected via USB on a long cable with an amplifier on the outer end.

"South" - Logitec Webcam C120M. Okay camera with little smearing of motion, and is better at handling sunlight with a sunglasses lens over it, but also has no low light sensitivity. Connect via USB with a short cable.

"East" - Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000 webcam. Better camera of the three USB cameras but still no low light sensitivity and needs a sunglasses lens to handle bright sunlight. I use the Microsoft program "Amcap" to access some controls to disable the AutoFocus feature, but I have to turn it off in VDV while I do so, and it sometimes forgets my change after a few days and I have to do it again. It is also connected via USB with a long cable with an amp on the outer end.

"zLaptop" - HP Webcam Built-into the screen of the Laptop. The 'z' in the name puts it at the bottom of the camera list so I can find it very quickly when I want to enable it on my way out the door. Okay camera, but poor low light sensitivity; not concerned about sunlight as its view is indoors. I assume it to be connected via USB internally.


I set VDV to keep data for 99 days and gave it 290GB to do it in. I have one rule for each camera, set to save if motion crosses a boundary on some, or passes over or on an area for the others.

It all works well for about 45 days and then cameras start to randomly disconnect and sometimes will reconnect on their own and sometimes I get antsy and turn it off and then back on and that sometimes fixes it right away and sometimes it takes several tries.

When it gets too balky, I finally give up and erase all the directories and start over and all is well again for about 45 days. This is not really a problem, it just takes a bit of time on my part to export any videos I want to keep permanently (few if any!) and then basically uninstall VDV, erase the directories, re-install VDV and redefine the cameras... less than an hour to do (the saving of videos is done when I find them throughout the month). I have made it a monthly ritual.

Now I want to add a sixth camera.

This is another USB camera and is the best as far as clarity, field of view, light sensitivity (still poor low light capability) and is by far the cheapest at about $12 with free shipping from Hong Kong. It is also on a long USB cable with an amp on the outer end.

Here is the problem... And it gets complicated!

AFTER I plug in the new camera, (I named it "Drive" because it views my driveway) it will work fine.

BUT - of the North, South and East cameras I can now only get two of them to work at any one time. Doesn't matter which two, but only two will turn on. The third one (last one to be turned on) reports "Unable to connect" after a few seconds. The other three cameras, West, zLaptop and the new one, Drive, continue to work fine. If I turn off one of the other two, I can then turn on the third one. But cannot get the one I turned off to turn back on. Shutting off any or all of the other three does not help.

Yet, "Amcap" is able to access any of the USB cameras if they are individually turned off in VDV.

To make matters worse, if I unplug the new camera, I still cannot get the same three cameras to work simultaneously... Even if I reboot and do not plug the new camera in! The other cameras still work fine as will any two of the specific three.

To restore the original 5 cameras to work as before I have to re-install VDV completely and never plug in the new camera.


I recognize the EXTREME difficulty of your troubleshooting this from my description (or even if you were sitting at the computer itself) and I guess I really do not expect a fix, so I am not sure why I even ask the question, but, well... Do you have any ideas?

[ryan]

Hi Semper,

For the problem with your new USB camera, I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions offhand, it sounds quite strange. I'll try to talk with the engineers more familiar with the USB handling and get back to you.

Your 45 day scenario also seems very odd. Do you have any logs from around the times when this occurs? If not, next time you notice it please either file a bug report, or if the machine is still unconnected you could manually copy the logs and email them in; I'd be happy to take a look and try to troubleshoot the problem.

[Semper Vaporo]

Additional experimentation produces more confusing info:

I also began to wonder if maybe it had to do with the order that the cameras were recognized by Winders... So I unplugged all of them and rebooted. Once VDV was up and running, I plugged in the cameras and turned them on in VDV one at a time.

I thought at first it had made a difference because one time I got the 4 USB Webcams to work for a few seconds, then one of them spontaneously disconnected. But I was unable to repeat the experience, no matter which order I plugged them in.

Thus I do not think the order of recognition is important.

I also wondered if it made any difference which ports they were plugged into and that seems to have some affect, but only in the way of making some of the cameras totally unworkable if they are in certain ports on the Laptop PC. One camera ("Drive") would never load the driver if it was plugged into one of the ports and only sometimes load the driver if plugged into the adjacent port (both on the right of the Laptop PC) If plugged into either of the ports on the left it worked fine.

I also found that none of them liked being plugged into a 4 port hub, most were intermittant as to whether they would work at all, but I didn't spend much time trying them all multiple times. There are only 4 USB ports on the PC and that means I cannot use a seperate mouse if all 4 cameras are plugged in, I am stuck with the built-in touchpad and I am absolutely no good using one of them so troubleshooting was frustrating since it took forever to position the arrow on an icon, etc. and I would get clicks where I didn't intend them... AAAARRRRRGGGGHHH!!!


I was concerned that the problem was with the oddball "Keychain Spy Cam" (which is what the 4th cam ["Drive"] is... cute device, about the size of a keyfob for locking your car, can take VGA photos, AVI videos, or act as a webcam... 640x480 image sensor, upscaled to 720x600 images, but no display (aim and hope for the best!)... great for sticking in the cab of a toy train to make a video of the garden railway from the "Engineer's viewpoint" or tape it to an R/C airplane to get a pilots view of your flying ability... just not in "real time")... The driver for this device is from a Chinese website (I do not read Chinese, I was told to lick on the middle link!)... it works but I am not confident it is a well designed and coded driver.

Anyway... I got another USB Webcam (Kodak S101 Webcam) and installed it in VDV as name "Test".

Attempting to use the Kodak camera ("Test") in place of the Spy Cam ("Drive") made no difference. I can still only get 3 USB cameras to work at one time.

I did not try many other combinations of cameras to see which ones might work in a group of 4... I am making the assumption that I am stuck with a maximum of 3 USB cameras.

I am also wondering if I could somehow remove the internal camera in the Laptop to see if then I could get one more external one (looking at the drivers list for that camera in Device Manager shows one name that has "USB" in it).

[Semper Vaporo]

Oh yeah... The 45 day problem. I sent a set of log files to Celeste a month or so ago, but no one found a problem in them. But I may have obfuscated it all by doing some manual clean-up of the directories myself.

After I started getting the random disconnects I started poking around and found that after VDV had removed all the videos from a day's directory it did not delete the directory itself. I also found that sometimes there would be no files listed in VDV for a particular day, but the directory would have one or two files in it anyway. So I started deleting the things that VDV should not care about (the old empty directories and the orphan files) just to see if freeing up disk space might affect the random disconnects, on the assumption that maybe excessive disk housekeeping duties might be causing a missed interrupt which caused the disconnect.

I realize that my sneaking behind the back of VDV to clean directories might be dangerous to the databases, but VDV did not seem to have a problem with it. (I have been a "hacker" since way back when it was a "respected profession" instead of a criminal's baileywick.) I also (knowing that I was going to erase everything and start over) deliberately deleted files that VDV was supposed to know about and it handled the missing files without going bonkers (good, smooth, intuitive error handling!).

Lots of little things can throw the wrench of the left-handed monkey into things. I have been beaned by that monkey many times... Especially when my carefully crafted program was moved from my tidy PC to the unwashed masses of random hardware and software installations.

I will reset my PC to allow more than 31 days again to see if the problem recurrs and send you some more log files.

[ryan]

Hi Semper,

Just to clarify, you're stating that you can only use 3 cameras at a time in Vitamin D, but your fourth or fifth you are able to open up in other applications while the original 3 are still running in VDV? In other words, you are able to have four or five USB cameras simultaneously streaming on that machine at expected performance, just not four or five in VDV?

With regard to empty folders in the data directory - we aren't as aggressive with cleaning up empty folders as we are with files, given that they take essentially zero space. There can also be some pretty nasty side effects if one is overzealous with this sort of thing - Process A creates a directory -> Process B sees an empty directory and deletes it -> Process A tries to put a file in the directory it just created and verified exists and is met with an unpleasant surprise... If there are files around but you aren't seeing anything in your search, it could be that they have data that doesn't match your given search, or perhaps that they were in use by another process or the operating system when we tried to delete them originally, and we made a note to come back and try again at some point in the future. Typically if you are deleting things from the video archive folder the worst you can do is wind up giving yourself 'Video not found' errors in the app, but it's definitely not supported and I wouldn't recommend it! And if you start poking around at things in the other directories or databases themselves, all bets are off...

[Semper Vaporo]

I am unable to repeat some of the things I have described and I question some of what I said because of that, as it was all written from memory. So right as I type this I have just rebooted the surveillance PC and will do some of the things and report exactly "what I see as I see them" right now. I have not run VDV yet.

I have 4 external USB cameras plugged in right now (using the touchpad for the mouse functions) plus the internal Webcam and the network IP cam.

Running AMCAP I can access any of the 4 external USB cams, plus the cam built into the computer screen frame (which I assume is a USB cam) one at a time. So with 5 USB cams all connected at the same time, I can view any ONE of them individually using AMCAP.

I just tried to run multiple instances of AMCAP (1st time I have tried this) and it allows that, so I can try to connect and view the cameras simultaneously.

The last time I ran and terminated AMCAP it was viewing the "East" (MS LifeCam 5000) camera so for each instance of AMCAP it tries to connect to that camera on startup. I left the 1st instance connected to it so the subsequent instances all gave an error message on startup ("Error 800705aa Cannot run preview Graph") and I click the OK button to acknowledge the error so I can select a different camera from the list of devices in the Device menu.

I connected "South" (Logitec Webcam C120M) next, then "Drive" (Spy cam) and those 3 ("East", "South" and "Drive") are displaying right now in seperate instances of AMCAP.

Then I ran AMCAP again, clicked OK on the error and selected "North" (Smart Webcam) and get the error message:

"Error 8007001f Cannot run preview Graph"

I then selected the Internal "HP Webcam" camera (HP Webcam) and it turns on the light on the screen bezel and is showing me looking down my nose to be able to focus on the screen through my bifocals.

So, I have 4 USB cams working in seperate instances of AMCAP, one internal and 3 external.

Running AMCAP again, and clicking OK on the error message gives me 5 windows open but I am unable to connect to the remaining external USB cam ("South"); I get the same error as before ("8007001f").

I just shut it all down and will reboot to try a different sequence of connecting them.

The 1st instance of AMCAP came up showing the "East" cam and I changed it to "Drive". The 2nd instance came up showing "East" again and I changed it to "North". Likewise the 3rd came up showing "East" and I changed it to "South". All are working.

The 4th instance of AMCAP gave the error message "8007001f Cannot run preview Graph" and does not show the "East" view. I changed the device to "HP Webcam" (zLaptop) and it works okay.

I have rebooted again and used Device Manager to "Disable" the internal HP Webcam and repeated the sequence of seeing each instance of AMCAP showing "East" and then changing it to one of the other cameras. But get the same results.

I have rebooted again and used Device Manager to "Uninstall" the internal HP Webcam, but get the same results.

I seem to be able to run any of the 3 external USB webcams, but not 4. But I can do 4 if I include the internal webcam.

This is all OUTSIDE of VDV, so the problem is definitely NOT with VDV.

I don't have any other computers that have that many USB ports and, as I noted earlier, I am unable to get any of the cameras to reliably operate via a USB hub expander, so I cannot determine if the problem is with just this particular PC or is some inherent limitation in Winders or maybe some setup parameter I don't know about.

I guess if I want more cameras they will need to be network/IP cameras. But the price differential between the least expensive IP cameras and the really cheap USB cameras I have now is tremendous and around here only USB cameras seem to be available off-the-shelf. Time for some web shopping!

[Semper Vaporo]

With regard to empty folders in the data directory - we aren't as aggressive with cleaning up empty folders as we are with files, given that they take essentially zero space. There can also be some pretty nasty side effects if one is overzealous with this sort of thing - Process A creates a directory -> Process B sees an empty directory and deletes it -> Process A tries to put a file in the directory it just created and verified exists and is met with an unpleasant surprise... If there are files around but you aren't seeing anything in your search, it could be that they have data that doesn't match your given search, or perhaps that they were in use by another process or the operating system when we tried to delete them originally, and we made a note to come back and try again at some point in the future. Typically if you are deleting things from the video archive folder the worst you can do is wind up giving yourself 'Video not found' errors in the app, but it's definitely not supported and I wouldn't recommend it! And if you start poking around at things in the other directories or databases themselves, all bets are off...

I got in this habit of keeping a "clean machine" back when I had all of 4000 "words" (12-bit) of memory for program AND data and "mass storage" was 5000 word 9-inch diameter, 12-inch long "drums" or "discs" that were quarter-inch thick and 3-ft in diameter. I would spend hours re-writing routines to gain an extra word or two of space to add some needed code to some totally unrelated routine. I have never gotten out of that habit even though my present machine has 4 gig of memory and 500 gig of disk space... and I am still out of memory!

I recognize and accept full responsibility when I shoot myself in the foot "poking around" or "Cleaning". It doesn't happen often, but sometimes it seems I have used a Howitzer with small thermonuclear devices in the chamber.

VDV, on the other hand, has recovered quite gracefully when I have been a bit too agressive in my obsessive housekeeping.

The only problems I have seen when using VDV I have reported here (or directly to Celeste) and there is really no guarantee that the problems reside within VDV or could even be corrected by some work-around being implemented in it.

I had a problem with my IP cam disconnecting at times. At first VDV was suspect because it was the new kid on the block, but I then correlated the problem to outdoor temperatures and found that the camera (though inside the house) was being affected and it proved to be the wireless connection failing in the colder temperatures behind the curtain where the camera views the outdoors. I wired the camera to the router and the problem went away.

The "Spy Cam" was doing random disconnects, but I was unable to correlate it to anything. VDV was less suspect but at one point I just gave up and bought a different camera. Recently I re-connected that camera and it has only disconnected a couple of times in the last month or so (unlike 10 times per day previously)... What changed? Hmmmm... new computer, new OS, new version of VDV, but the same camera and software driver that came with it. It is also a different time of year.

The problem with the random disconnects of all the cameras a couple of months ago was after all the changes had settled down and it had been working okay (and I had not stuck my big foot into things!). The only change that I could determine was the overload of the disk drive. So my initial troubleshooting focused there. Reseting everything (uninstall/reinstall) seemed to cure the problem so I just backed off and decided to do that with some regularity. That may not be the cure others would be willing to accept, but does anyone else have the problem at all?

Besides, it hasn't been long enough to re-overload the drive to see if it happen again before 31 days have elapsed. That was one reason I decided to add another camera (to load the disk faster) and ran into this present USB problem... I just reported it a bit too soon since it now seems to be a problem with my present hardware/OS software instead of VDV, but in troubleshooting it I noted the orphan files and empty directories.

VDV is so new that I am pretty sure that no one has collected enough video yet to run into a problem with VDV not having room to store new data because of these orphan files consuming space, but it "could" occur... It kind of depends on where or how VDV is determining it has used its alloted space out of the space actually available on a disk. Might be a few years before it is a problem, and before that happens I bet the people into the hot and heavy usage of VDV will be buying newer computers with bigger yet diskdrives and essentially starting the whole thing over again and never experience the problem. Few people will be trying to save the data for 99 days... The default of 2 days is long enough for most commercial applications (a weekend) and maybe 2 weeks is long enough for most home installations (vacation)... I just set it to 99 just to see what would happen! Guess I found out. (Maybe. )

[ryan]

Hi Semper,

Sorry about your USB limit, though I must admit I'm glad to here it's a system problem and not a bug in VDV.

VDV is so new that I am pretty sure that no one has collected enough video yet to run into a problem with VDV not having room to store new data because of these orphan files consuming space, but it "could" occur... It kind of depends on where or how VDV is determining it has used its alloted space out of the space actually available on a disk.

This shouldn't be a problem. For one, the 'orphan' files are cleaned up, they aren't left there forever. Additionally, to determine how much space is currently available for recording, we do roughly the following calculation: MINIMUM( (Space you requested - space currently used by the video), space left on disk). You can see that the 'orphan' files are still counted in the space being used. If either we're close to the requested capacity or the hard drive itself is almost full we initiate some cleanup routines.