Pause camera activity to hibernate?

[Semper Vaporo]

Many years ago, Windows 3.1 era, I wrote programs that could throw keystrokes at other programs to control them. I could just enumerate the present open windows, find the one I wanted by reading the title bar and then send keystrokes to the one I wanted. As Winders has become more security focused It is a lot harder to do that unless the program receiving the keystokes is a child process of the program doing the "typing".

I no longer have access to the development software to write such code (nor the Windows specifications to know how!), but maybe someone that does could write a "parent" program that would start VDV and at some later time send the appropriate keystrokes to VDV to turn off the cameras and then send more to make it terminate.

It would only need some sort of setup dialog that would let the user set the time of day that it should shut down VDV which should in turn close the other Agent programs. Once the Agents are stopped and VDV is also, then the parent program could also terminate and Winders should be able to hibernate without problems. Maybe????

[Donone]

Thanks again Doug. I must apologise. Due to the time between posts I have not been re-reading the posts and had forgotten about your comments on cleaning and got carried away with my reasoning.
I am sure that you are correct. I didn't quite follow about keep the schedule the same. It has been on the same schedule for at least 4 days and the keep files for 10 days. To my mind the latter setting has no effect because presumably every day a check is done and one days video (that amount over 2 days) cleaned. I see there would be some variation dependent upon what items were detected (Rules or not).
What would solve the problem is to have the cleaning done when the camera is turned off. The time required must be pretty fixed to erase one days video. Say it was an hour, I could turn off the camera 90 minutes before the computer to be safe.
At present it is possible?? that VDV would randomly choose ten minutes before my camera is set to turn off, and defeat me.

I believe that you suggestion that no cleaning would take place for 2 days only applies when the system is first set up (for 2 days) and then would revert to daily deleting one days worth.

Under the circumstances my comment about frames is now irrelevant, since my theory was incorrect about not processing quick enough.

I would welcome further suggestions (so that I can beat the 15 September deadline!!) or perhaps some way to set the cleaning time start.

[EDIT] I do know that the activity kept PC from hibernating. Yesterday the disk activity stopped all day and only showed one second blips. I DON'T know why, I had only installed Net Framework 3.5. I noted the datestamp on the hiberfile.sys file and this morning found it to be the same as yesterday when I did a test. I manually hibernated this morning and discovered that the timestamp still did not change. WEIRD. Does that perhaps mean that some of the time it has hibernated but not changed the timestamp??
I need a foolproof way to detect if hibernation happened (and I can't think of one because memory is saved and then copied back so no difference out to be detectable) because I cannot be there to see at the normal time, but all manual tests have worked.
Somebody out there is smart enough to suggest a way, or knows why the datestamp doesn't change.

[Semper Vaporo]

Assumming you are using Windows and have an NTFS file structure (not a FAT type) then there area several "Dates" kept concerning each file. The one labled "DATE" is usually the same as the "Date Created", so the value for the Hibernation file would not change.

When viewing the files using 'My Compter' or 'Windows Explorer', click on the "View" menu and select "Details". Then RIGHT-click on the bar just above the data area that contains the labels for each column; this will present a menu of things that the details mode can show. You may have to clck the "More..." entry at the bottom of the list. This will present a list of dozens of items that each file can have data stored about it. Scroll down to the "Date" section and pick the "Date Accessed" and "Date Modified" items. (There are several other Date type items, but most are used for photo or video type files and are unused [i.e.: will be blank] for the Hibernation file.)

See if that will give you an indication of when the computer has hibernated.

[Donone]

Thank you for your input Semper Vaporo. I always have Date Modified showing. Any file changes always show the new date/time. I don't know what it gave before yesterday but I set the computer to hibernate at 3.30pm and awake at 3.40pm. I watched and it worked. At the end the date time oddly showed the correct date but time as 3.46pm.
Last evening it was timed to hibernate at 8.30pm and awake this morning at 7am.
The computer was on when I visited but the date/time was still as before on the hibernate file.
I decided to test and put the system into manual hibernation then awoke it and it still had the same.

I cannot imagine that one could hibernate several times, albeit with the same program running, and save the memory to file such that it is identical and perhaps did not require rewriting the hibernate file.
If the date/time is not modified by hibernate then I ask myself why did the date/time change yesterday?
I am baffled.
It may be that the computer is hibernating except when disk cleaning happens to coincide.
I just cannot prove it. Anything I set up as a test, will be saved from memory and then restored.

[Donone]

The system is doing nothing else and is Semperon 2800 (2GHz); Memory 1.5GB; disk space 40GB.
Further experiments show the following...
I set the video to be kept for 25 days.
Through the program I deleted all clips and indexes before 8 days ago.
I started the program set to log people in an area and left it recording yesterday.
It appears to have hibernated and woken today.

The disk activity is continuous. The recording has been going for 2 hours today.
It has logged 246 clips of all objects and 64 people in an area.
It is a windy day and the recording bar at the screen bottom shows all blue (no green between clips) due to bush/tree movement.

Conclusion: The program is NOT disk cleaning.

Were the program to have a preference to ONLY detect people in the area (or whatever) with no bushes or trees, instead of logging every movement and then filter it to people in an area (or whatever), the activity might be less???

[Semper Vaporo]

I don't think your 40GB drive is big enough to hold 25 days of video. I have one camera that views an only somewhat busy scene and in 9 days it is using 54GB.

I bet windows itself is running a defrag service trying to keep up with VDV deleting the oldest files. You can shut off the automatic scheduling of Defrag to see if that is the problem. See "Administrative Tools > Task Scheduler" in the Start menu.

But I think you need a MUCH bigger harddrive... something on the order of 300 to 500 GB.

[doug]

Donone,

I have to say that I haven't been following every last detail, but can you give this a try just to humour me? For the sake of this example, let's say that you don't need the camera from 3:00pm till 6:00pm.

1. Set "keep all temporary video" to 1 day. If you've got VDV setup right, you really shouldn't need more. This roughly says that VDV should keep _all_ video for 1 day and then after 1 day convert to clips (only keep video marked for saving--by default all video with moving objects in it).
2. Set your rule schedule in VDV to turn the camera off from 3:00pm till 6:00pm.
3. Let this run for a full day so that there is no video at all YESTERDAY from 3:00pm till 6:00pm.
4. Set your computer to try to hibernate starting at 3:15pm (15 minutes after camera shutoff) and wake up at 6:00pm.

I'm guessing that this will work for you. Remember: unless you're low on disk space, the disk cleaner runs on video exactly "keep all temporary video" days ago. ...so if you are keeping 1 day of video, there needs to be nothing to clean from 24 hours before you want to hibernate.


-Doug


P.S. If you want to save on disk space and have a bush in the scene, you may be able to make the default rule have a region that excludes the area of the bush. You'll get all video saved for 1 day, but when things are converted to clips then all video with motion only in the area of the bush will be deleted.

[Donone]

Thanks both for input. I really do appreciate the suggestions but I have done them.
I am no longer certain that the activity prevents hibernation. I just can't prove that it goes off when I am not there. Well as an afterthought I can by telling it to hibernate but not turn back on. I will try that tomorrow!!!

I think that if you note what I have said, I have no video to scrub out. It is set to enough days and have no video on the disk to be wiped or converted. I have therefore exceeded your suggestion.
Unless I have totally missed the point, it will keep all recordings for 25 days and THEN start to delete or convert. The only recordings so far are 8 days worth. Therefore the only activity is the recording itself and the analysis of the recordings.
As was said a few posts back the deleter etc should start, find no video to delete for another 16 days and then stop.
I did the tests with turning the camera off well before hibernating.

Please correct me if I have got the above wrong.

[doug]

Donone,

That's mostly right. ...40GB of space is not enough for 25 days of video, so the disk cleaner will actually kick in much earlier. ...but you're right that setting it to 25 days will prevent the disk cleaner from "constantly" running when the video is off. It should finish up after a period of time and stop cleaning if no new video comes in (and nothing else fills up the disk more). Of course, once 25 days pass, you'll be right back to where you started--the disk cleaner will be constantly working trying to make clips from things 25 days ago.

I would really try setting it to 1 day. Generally we haven't found lots of reasons to keep all video for longer than a day or two (since all important video has motion detected in it), but added that option in for people that really wanted to make sure they got all video.

-Doug

[Donone]

Thank you Doug for your continued patience with this. I will do the test of one day as you suggest. In fact this system is monitoring something for a legal issue and whist most video is not required to be kept (once viewed and eliminated) any that is required I save as separate clips. Normally the video is kept for the minimum period between visits to the system and camera.

No, the 25 days was to prove a point, i.e. that by setting it as such and removing any video older than say 8 days meant that the cleaner would not be working and the only activity would be the recording and the analysis. I have before that test never come close to filling the disk.

I have just turned the camera off after noting with Process Explorer the I/O from the processes which are in a tree.
As a child of VDV Video there is an agent that has 3/4 child agents. The typical readings byte output on alternate samples of about one second repetitively are:
Presumably with no cleaning...
Camera off during at least two hours.
Video 2744 / 1406
Sub agent 149116 / 768
Sub-sub1 1038 / 692
Sub-sub2 784 / 768
Sub-sub3 784 / 768

Camera on
Video 610 / 0
Sub Agent 6738 / 6738
Sub-sub1 276 / 0
Sub-sub2 528 / 528
Sub-sub3 528 / 528
Sub-sub4 63675 / 39522

I will now set the video to be kept for one day. I will have to visit the system daily to save the video to clips for later viewing.
Meanwhile any comments on the above would be welcome. The figures are typical, not fixed.