Sub Streams and continuous recording

[atreyu]

Busting this out to its own thread. I was wondering if you can still have continuous SD recording and triggered HD recording with the convenience of a dual stream single camera configuration.

atreyu: Here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask. With configuring a camera as a single dual stream, can you continuously record the SD stream and only trigger recordings on the HD stream?

Ideally it would be a single recording that Upgrades to HD when triggered.

Hmm, an interesting thought but I think there would be problems. Is this how it works with a different NVR system that you have seen ?

My main cameras record 24/7 and that logic would reduce the chance of me finding out what happened just before the camera triggered, as it would be in SD. Would there be any point in recording the SD before the trigger ? If it is to save hard drive space - and the SD video is useless for identifying issues - then you may as well only record in HD when it triggers. My "Storage" drive is a 12.7TB drive, and that gives me three months of video with five cameras. Where it might be useful, is if you have many more cameras.

Open for discussion ! We are all learning here

Maybe I'm over thinking it. I currently have each camera cloned into SD and HD streams. The SD is always recorded and motion plus AI triggers the HD recordings. Primarily wondering if I use the Dual Stream configuration can I keep my current behavior of always recording SD and collecting triggered HD clips. The HD streams maintain a 20s buffer to capture the triggering event in HD.

As you mention, as I recently got into this, I was doing continuous recording SD for size/length kept. Then trigger the HD for interesting events. Seems like a good compromise between not needing to be overly trigger happy on alerts, but I have the SD fallback if it does miss something. You can still tell a lot from the SD recording, especially since I would be concerned about people close to the house and near the cameras.

Anyway, it would be nice to not have the cameras duplicated and have the viewing behavior of dual stream configurations (SD in tile view/HD in single view). Seamlessly splicing in the HD clips into the SD stream for a single video file per camera would be icing on the cake.

As I typed this, maybe a compromise is continuous recording the HD and after 1mo, automatically transcoding the HD to SD.

[InTheAir17]

I'd like this as well. One Camera that has continuous record on SD stream and capture clips on the HD stream. I'd cut my camera count in half... that would be awesome.

[TimG]

I don't know how regularly Support read posts here (This being a user to user help forum in the main), so I suggest you send an email to Support and ask if it is possible.

Personally, I would still like to be able to keep all recordings in HD. Hard drives are cheap enough, and the thought of missing a detail in a recording when searching for "what happened before it triggered" but not being able to clearly see it because it was in SD makes me feel

But as I have said before, Blue Iris is the Swiss Army knife of cctv software, so it won't hurt to ask if it can have a new shiny tool

[danjb]

It's quite a coincidence, I came to the forum to ask this very question and find it is at the top of the list! Talk about serendipity!

I'd like this feature as well. I have 8K cameras and recording a combined main/sub stream using h265 can eat over 2GB per hour. Multiply that by a bunch of cameras and it can start to be big restriction in how many days of history you can keep. Given the substream is there, and Blue Iris can happily separate the two streams when it wants to, this seems like it hopefully wouldn't be too huge a change. Maybe an option on the Configure convert/export dialog to say export substream only.

OK, I just went to the Configure convert/export dialog and I see it has a "Use sub stream if available" option:

Use Sub stream if available.jpg (15.99 KiB) Viewed 16279 times

Is this double serendipity? Has this feature already been added? I am on release 5.3.7.11 x64 (1/4/2021)

[TimG]

danjb: Some experimentation is required. Please let us know what you find

[danjb]

Well, I tried it and it looks like that setting does exactly what was requested. I chose to use the sub-stream, output MP4, turned off re-encode video, made sure resize video was turned OFF. The result is I get 640x480 MP4's at least 15X smaller than the equivalent bvr files. And as far as I could tell, no real CPU spikes during the conversions.

[atreyu]

So this is a continuous SD export? You can’t view it in app, but you have the files if desired?

[nlabs95]

Hey danjb, im pretty new to Bi and im trying to configure it just like you did it. Continuous recording in sd for example and when triggered with a higher res and higher framerate.
could you explain me how i have to set it up in order to work like this?

[roadkill401]

It looks interesting, but I wonder, this setting, how does it know the different states between recording continuous in the low-res and then triggered to record in high-res?

[sbaker1106]

I realize this post was started in January but apparently it still has interest from people. I don't know exactly when it was added but BI 5 handles recording the sub stream 24/7 and the main stream on either trigger or alert natively.

In a nutshell to help point people that's unaware of this feature in the right direction start with this:
First make sure the camera that you are working with has both main and sub streams enabled. This is a single camera in BI and not two cameras as was needed before.
Once both streams are attached you need to verify that this camera is recording "Direct-to-disc" and is also recording to the native BVR file format.
Then simply set your trigger(s) as you want them on the Trigger tab.
Then on the Record tab right next to "Video" in the drop down box select either "Continuous + Triggered" or "Continuous + Alerts". Both of those settings will record the sub stream continuously and for the first one it will record the main HD stream every time the camera triggers and the second option will also record the sub stream continuously but won't record the main HD stream when the camera is triggered, the camera must be triggered and confirmed by AI (DeepStack) or otherwise before the camera will actually record the main HD stream.

If anything is unclear make sure to use the help button on each screen listed above, the help file has just about all the info you need to get this working right.

I realize that a lot of you may already know this exists but there are plenty of people who don't, so hopefully this post can help a few people simplify their setup and get the most out of BI. Cheers!