Forums/Version 2/Beta testing support area
Just some thoughts for you
Casey
asked this on October 20, 2011 09:43
I returned my card but still wanted to add my final thoughts to help you out with development -- I could see myself buying the card and software again in the future.
1) Must get the pre-buffer working.
2) Perhaps compression setting needs more keyframes? I'm not an expert on video compression, but I saw many events where part of the capture was totally blank/black except for whatever what moving. Like it missed the initial keyframe.
3) A way to save important events - an "archive" if you will.
4) Event severity scoring. How to weed out significant events -- is it just the wind blowing the tree around again or is it someone walking right up to the camera? As far as I can see event duration and frequency of events are the only clues now and that could be improved I think.
5) 704 x 480? What resolution is that? I think my cameras are 640 x 480 or so. I noticed that the images looked stretched in the width dimension. Can you let us put in our own capture resolution?
I also have examples of bad quality video, notable where frames skip around. Would you like to see that, how can I send it to you (and only you)?
Thanks.
-Casey
Comments
Casey,
We are working out some video quality issues that you mentioned and it is our priority.
The archiving feature is actually one of the basic ones that was originally conceived, in fact there is a database field for it, but it is not yet supported in the server. It is a simple feature and it will be added in one of our next releases.
Video analytics are a bit difficult: there are multiple advanced ways of detecting motion, objects, noise separation etc that are available, but with increasing complexity the load on CPU increases exponentially. We are looking to adding custom motion detection profiles. Most of the times, however, proper motion sensitivity mapping and well positioned cameras can eliminate most of the unwanted events.
704x480 is the D1 resolution, which is standard for the NTSC. For more information about conversion from analog to digital, you can check out this article. For the dvr cards, just as with IP cameras, the resolution may be changed, but within the hardware limitations -- using own resolution will most likely cause further distortions or non-working video.
You can email the video samples to our support email, or use your account here to add them to a ticket.
Thanks!
Alex is correct, camera resolution does not mean input resolution. The video from the camera will be down-sampled to the support resolution of the card. In this case, D1 is defined as 704x480 or 720x480, which is what the cards support. 320x240 or 352x240 is another resolution the cards support.
Hmm. Well, resolution be what it will, switching from my old system to BC with this card resulted in the camera images being too wide on the screen (whether live or recorded events). BTW, what support email do you mean? Is there a support@corp.bluecherry.net? The files are small enough to email.