What's your Blue Iris recording sizes or length of time before creating the next camera BVR file

[saltwater]

I record 24/7, have 13 cameras and that equates to 9 days on my 8 TB drive. Of that 8TB I've allocated 7.2 to Blue Iris storage. For all my cameras I have them cut after 1 hr and thus the next file is then created. Each file size is around the 1.5 to 1.9 GB. All the BVR files remain in the NEW folder, I do not move them out to the STORED folder.

It's crossed my mind a few times, as I'm not moving those files around, moving from one folder to another folder, is there any real need to keep the files as small as they are, could they be split at 2 hrs, or longer and have no detrimental effect to my system?

I'm curious as to how others configure this part of Blue Iris.

 

[Broachoski]

Mine is basically the same, 1 hour clips. It is easy for me at that size to go back through the clips if I need too and they are not to large to handle at that size.

 

[SouthernYankee]

My Standard allocation post.

1) Do not use time (limit clip age)to determine when BI video files are moved or deleted, only use space. Using time wastes disk space.
2) If New and stored are on the same disk drive do not used stored, set the stored size to zero, set the new folder to delete, not move. All it does is waste CPU time and increase the number of disk writes. You can leave the stored folder on the drive just do not use it.
3) Never allocate over 90% of the total disk drive to BI.
4) if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB. Really big files are difficult to transfer.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD (the C: drive).
6) Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
7) Do not run virus scanners on BI folders
8) an alternate way to allocate space on multiple drives is to assign different cameras to different drives, so there is no file movement between new and stored.
9) Never use an External USB drive for the NEW folder. Never use a network drive for the NEW folder.
10) for performance do not put more than about 10,000 files in a folder, the search and adding files will eat CPU and disk performance. Look at using a sub folder per camera (see &CAM in bi help)


Advanced storage:
If you are using a complete disk for large video file storage (BVR) continuous recording, I recommend formatting the disk, with a windows cluster size of 1024K (1 Megabyte). This is a increase from the 4K default. This will reduce the physical number of disk write, decrease the disk fragmentation, speed up access.
Hint:
On the Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph) clip storage tab, if there is any red on the bars you have a allocation problem. If there is no Green, you have no free space, this is bad.

 

[Mike A.]

I use 4 hours for no particular reason other than 8 is a huge file and kind of hard to scrub through as well and with 20 cams 1 hour gave me too many files to look back though all the time. 4 seemed like a good compromise. Mine never get copied or moved anywhere. If I need something I do an export out and save that.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I use one hour for continuous recording size. The number of files is basically unimportant. I use UI3 to review overnight, and daytime ,alerts which is way faster and more convenient that fast forwarding through hours of .bvr files. The only time I've had to scrub through hours of .bvr files was when an incident happened to my next door neighbor and the alerts drive had aged out the time period, weeks prior. Anything I've needed to document, otherwise, I locate in UI3, then export it from the .bvr file. It's very easy to find the right file based on day and time from UI3.

 

[Sybertiger]

Continuous 24/7 with cut at 1 hour. 1024K cluster size. I don't move any files. Prefer to use BI interface instead of UI3 if I need to save/export a segment of video.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I like UI3 for the animated alerts. More info in very little time when you're looking for something.

 

[wittaj]

Once upon a time, an older version help file said that once you got over 200,000 clips (or files) you would get a warning notice.

So even though it doesn't say that in Version 5, I know that when I got to 200,000 it got slower and was always getting warning conditions.

So I cut back what I was "recording". Did I really need hi-rez alert thumbnails and hi-rez images from the record tab on every camera. NOPE....you can always play the video and stop it and snapshot it. That eliminated a lot of the clips.

I was also doing the one hour clip thing and inevitably something would happen I was watching and would have to then jump to another file, so now mine are 8, 12, and 24 hours depending on the camera. None of my files move folders after recorded.

I find that I can scrub the video just fine. My system is very responsive and no lag when pulling up a past event.

It keeps my clips count at the bottom of the BI console below 15,000 clips now.

 

[saltwater]

Thanks for all the responses, what I didn't mention is that my clips sit around the 21k mark. Over this weekend I might change from 1 to 2 hr BVR files and see how things go. With the 1 hr clip what I find annoying is trying to watch incidents that are 2 mins at the end of one clip continuing to the next clip. I know that will always be the case but with longer clips it's cut in half if going from 1 to 2 hr clips.