New clip being created after every dropped frame

nst197

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I am new to BI and have it working pretty well so far. I've got it set to continuous record, but my issue is that I'm getting a new clip created approx. every 5-8 mins even though I've set it to split every 1hr or 4GB. This seems to correlate to when frames are being dropped, if I open the RTSP stream in VLC I can see the dropped frame counter incrementing each time BI starts a new clip.
Is there any way to get BI to ignore the dropped frames and continue recording on the same clip until it reaches the 1hr limit?
 

nst197

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I've tried to find out why it's dropping frames with no success. The logs on both the camera and BI don't show anything, and when I run a continuous ping it doesn't drop any ping packets, so suggests it's not network related. Having the stream open in VLC it appears to play continuously without any visible errors and it's only in the statistics that you can see it's dropping the occasional frame. I'd come to the conclusion that dropping one frame in every 5000 or so was normal behaviour or just a feature of the relatively cheap Chinese camera I've got, hence why I was focusing on getting BI to handle it rather than thinking it needed fixing.
Is it not normal to lose any frames then? Any suggestions where else I can look to try and work out what could be causing it?
 

wittaj

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Turn off the watchdog feature for the camera and see if that takes care of it.
 

SouthernYankee

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Is the bi computer connected to the same switch as the camera.
The video traffic should never run through the router on the way to the bi pc.
 

nst197

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The camera and BI server are on separate switches which are connected together, so not on the same switch but not going through the router. Camera has a 100mb full duplex connection and BI server has 1gb full duplex. The two switches are linked on a 100mb full duplex connection.
When I open the main rtsp stream from VLC it's using between 6-7mbps. That's 2048x1536 (3MB) at 10FPS. I also have BI connecting to the Substream on the camera which is set to D1 also at 10FPS, and uses around 600 kbps.
 

SouthernYankee

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with that setup you should not be dropping frames.

What is your watchdog setting on the camera, a screen shot would help.
 

nst197

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I tried disabling the watchdog as @wittaj suggested but found that the clip would just freeze/stop recording until I manually restart the camera (in bI) with that setup. Then it would resume the same clip but with a big time gap in it.

It's now set back to default settings apart from reducing the timeout period:

1617927542611.png
 

wittaj

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Wow so it really is dropping out. In many instances, Watchdog would think it dropped but it actually wasn't.
 

nst197

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It's really bizarre. Like I said if you open it in VLC and watch you'd never notice anything was wrong. But it seems like the single dropped frame every now and then is enough for BI to throw a hissy fit. I'm guessing VLC is just programmed to ignore it and carry on where as BI isn't.
 
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