Pause camera activity to hibernate?

[Donone]

I have set my camera computer to hibernate and wake up automatically. It works perfectly.
When the camera is on the hibernate after 2 minutes no longer works because of the activity that the camera.VitaminD is creating.
Is there any way to pause the recording before hibernation and resume immediately after wakeuup?

I am using two Power Profiles and two tasks in scheduler.

[doug]

Donone,

If I'm understanding correctly, you've got your computer set to hibernate on a schedule want to prevent Vitamin D Video from waking your computer back up from hibernate.

Normally, I wouldn't think that Vitamin D would cause the computer to wake up. I just tried this on my computer and it didn't happen. ...but I do seem to remember people running into this in the past, so let me think about it...

The best suggestion I can come up with is to check the "wake on lan" setting of your network adapter and/or BIOS. It's possible that the computer is detecting the network activity of the camera and waking itself up. Turning that off may fix the problem. I think that the procedure for this differs for each computer/network adapter, so you might need to do a little searching.

Another possible solution is to add a schedule to the rules for your cameras in Vitamin D Video. If no rules are scheduled at a given time, the camera will automatically be turned off. Scheduling the camera to turn off just before hibernate seems like it should fix your problems.


If you solve this, please post a follow-up message so that we know what worked. Thanks!

-Doug

[Donone]

Thank you Doug. I will post results when done.
My problem is that the camera activity is preventing hibernation in the first place, waking works next day OK.
However your solution sounds great, i.e. turn off before hibernate and naturally turn on after wake up.
I am using the Free version and have not discovered such settings as you suggest. If they are in this version please advise.
Thanks

[doug]

Donone,

Check out this link for info on scheduling. It should be there in the free version: http://www.vitamindvideo.com/support/re ... ps_23.html

-Doug

[Donone]

Thank you for that vital information Doug. Yes I was able to turn the camera off/on. It did not solve my problem.
I shut the camera off then 10 minutes later the Task scheduler should have switch power profiles such that the system then hibernated after 1 minute. It did not ( will return to that...)
The Task scheduler should then have awoken 10 minutes later in order to switch power profiles and then stayed awake until the cycle would repeat.

What happened... The camera timed out and the cpu activity dropped to typically 4% (hibernation requires my 1 minute to stay below 10% or the 1 minute timer would restart, but it should not prevent hibernation indefinitely).
2 of the normal 5 VitaminD Agents were still running at typically 2% each. It should have worked. The disk light was on during the whole process and I wonder if it was still recording a backlog after 10 minutes??

Any suggestions would be useful.
If I manually hibernate it works fine.
Thanks
Donone

[doug]

Donone,

Hmmm, it's probably that Vitamin D's "disk cleaner" is what's causing all of the disk activity and keeping your system awake. The disk cleaner runs periodically and converts your "temporary video" into clips (so that only video that was marked for saving is kept in the end). There's no real way to disable this. Sorry!

I think that's about all I can suggest, since I've never used a hibernation scheme like you're describing. Hopefully you can figure out some way to tweak your settings to make things work better for you. Best of luck!

-Doug

[Donone]

Thank you for your help Doug.
I understand what you say and will investigate leaving, say, an hour between camera off and hibernate, then progressively increase that until it gets too close to the wakeup time to be worth while hibernating in the first place. It will still save some power even if it is several hours nightly.
I will report back on results.
Donone

[Donone]

An update and a question.
I found that my extra time did not solve the problem. The disk still has activity when the camera is off.
One Agent is showing intermittent 02 in the processes the other five are 00 and the Video entry shows 02.
The camera had been off all night but the computer on.
The camera came on for an hour and then off but although it recorded there were no objects of any kind detected.
If the program is shut down disk activity stops.

If the program is restarted the disk activity is simply a few blips every second or so but later becomes permanent.
When the camera is running cpu activity hovers around 50% and drops to 4% when off.

Can anybody say what is activating the disk permanently when no objects are being analysed and the camera is off.
Desperate!

[Donone]

It has become obvious that the processing of the incoming video, builds up over a relatively short time and gets behind real life, massively.
I can see no way around this from a user perspective.
The program analyses constantly for any movement regardless of the Rules set, the Rule simply being a filter. I can see that it can be no other way unless the analysis were psychic and had foresight. However...

Suppose that the frame capture rate were 20 frames/sec, it would be useful if the user could select to only have VDV analyse, say, every 40th frame (2 secs) or be provided with a choice. The user could decide the time period dependent upon the likely events to be detected. In this way it could conceivably be set to one frame per hour. Any such 'cherry picking' would heavily reduce the overhead of processing time and disk activity, such that it could actually keep up with real life.
That would in turn permit the computer to be hibernated automatically some reasonable time after turning off a camera, as I have been attempting, rather than not managing after two hours.

I feel that there must be other users who would appreciate being able to do this.
Does anybody have any comments please before I finally decide that I have to find an alternative. I like this software, it seems unique, but too busy with no chance of reducing the business.

[doug]

Donone,

I think you're still seeing the disk cleaner. The disk cleaner runs periodically and converts temporary video to clips. ...this process is significantly delayed by design. Assuming that you're not low on disk space (which makes things more complicated), let's say that your settings indicate to keep 2 days of temporary video. That means that when the disk cleaner runs, it will look at video that is older than 2 days and convert it to clips. This operation uses disk and CPU time.

It is possible that if you keep the same schedule of your camera for several days, things will work better. That would be because Vitamin D Video's disk cleaner would see no video from exactly 2 days ago and would have nothing to clean. The disk cleaner would run and the immediately stop processing.


To answer your other question: VDV always tries to process 10 frames per second. The algorithms that VDV uses are tuned for video that is 8-10FPS. If VDV seems more than 10FPS, it will throw away the extra video. VDV will try to run at lower frame rates, but might not detect / identify objects as well. Unless your computer is very slow, VDV can easily keep up with 1 camera at 10FPS. If VDV is unable to keep up, it will get slightly backlogged (in case there was just a temporary spike in CPU utilization) and then eventually fall to lower and lower frame rates as needed.


I would also ask: isn't there any way to get your computer to hibernate even if there is CPU / disk activity?


If someone else reading this has more experience with the type of hibernation scheme that Donone is using and has ideas for him, it would certainly be great if you could respond.

-Doug