Direct to Disk recording

[Thixotropic]

I finally got around to switching all my cams to Direct to Disk recording last night, and the CPU usage dropped from around 35% or 40% down to under 20%. Right now it's running pretty steady at around 18%. My cameras only support H264 (not 265) but wow, what a difference.

I also noticed that with the more recent updates in the last couple of weeks I'm getting virtually no dropouts or loss of signal errors; not sure if it was the updates that changed that or not. Some of the cameras gave me these errors all the %$#@! time, day and night, now they seem to run without any problem. I've not changed anything in my network so I'm not really sure what got better. (??)

Since we're under lockdown/self-quarantine I imagine I'll have more time to tinker with my BI setup. lol

I went out yesterday to the Post Office and there was no traffic at all on a highway near me that's normally busy night and day. Yesterday it was just me and 2 other cars. In over 35 years I've never seen it that empty, not on Christmas day or New Years or ever. Kind of shocking to see the highway completely deserted, like something out of The Walking Dead.

[TimG]

In the new manual it says that the overlays are not stored in direct.
I have the Overlays in the setup in the IP cameras so they should be sending them over in the stream.

As I understand it, Direct to disk means that any overlay from the camera will be saved to the BI5 drive, but any overlay added from BI5 will not. Direct to disk will save a lot of cpu, and with that many cameras I think you need all the tweaks you can find

[WmG]

My experience is as TimG understands it to be. BI D2D doesn't take anything from the camera feed that isn't already there - date, day time and camera "name" from my Hikvisions - but the weather info I add after the fact is lost when D2D is used.

[LOOPYLOOP]

i use direct to disc only for some cameras, the more important i don't.
sometimes playback is glitchy and probaby 10% come up as file not found on playback when i use direct to disc.

[Thixotropic]

sometimes playback is glitchy and probaby 10% come up as file not found on playback when i use direct to disc.

Is this a known issue? Are other seeing this too?

I did a spot-check of some of my cams and didn't find any missing clips, but I only checked a few. If this is a known problem then I'd like to know so I can switch back to encode/record.

[HeneryH]

i use direct to disc only for some cameras, the more important i don't.
sometimes playback is glitchy and probaby 10% come up as file not found on playback when i use direct to disc.

This is definitely a bug with how your system is set up. Your solution of not-using d2d is a hack that is costing you some serious CPU horsepower.

[TimG]

Hi JVH,

How is cpu loading looking ? Can you compare it to the previous software ?

[HeneryH]

FYI you can still use BI motion detection along with D2D.

I use D2D and take advantage of all of BIs goodness except for BI generated overlays being saved.

[Thixotropic]

I use D2D and take advantage of all of BIs goodness except for BI generated overlays being saved.

That's how I do it- I have the cams add the timestamps and names to the video so BI doesn't have to.

[HeneryH]

@JVH was using phrases in the post above mine that maybe seemed like he thought using BI Motion Detection somehow was linked to not having D2D enabled. Just wanted to be sure he knew they were separate concepts and using D2D doesn't mean you can't use BI features. BI just wont include any data in the raw video stream. the database of alerts and clips and all are still there even in D2D.