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PeteCress

Surveillance: Just .JPGs Instead of Clips?

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Setting up BlueIris for a friend's house, I was trying to figure out why BI was FTP-ing Alert .JPGs a-ok, but not FTP-ing video Clips at all.

 

But then it started to dawn on me that a bunch of .JPG Alerts snapped every second were pretty much all one could ask for from a surveillance perspective. Just open up something like JPEGView, hold a finger on PageDown, and you've basically got a 1 FPS (assuming that's how the clips are timed) video.

 

That being true, why even bother with video Clips?

 

What is the flaw in my thinking?

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That being true, why even bother with video Clips?

 

What is the flaw in my thinking?

 

Also, not sure about Blue Iris compression rates or iframe interval, but a 60 frames of video at 1fps should come in smaller in size than 60 frames of .jpg shot at 1fps. Video compression uses I frames which only alter portions of the shot that have changed. Perhaps a very busy scene wouldn't have much difference in file size, but a living room while everyone is away could be considerably less.

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Also, not sure about Blue Iris compression rates or iframe interval, but a 60 frames of video at 1fps should come in smaller in size than 60 frames of .jpg shot at 1fps. Video compression uses I frames which only alter portions of the shot that have changed. Perhaps a very busy scene wouldn't have much difference in file size, but a living room while everyone is away could be considerably less.

 

Got it.....

 

But the scenario is a break-in where the first thing the perpetrators see is the old laptop that is serving as a cam server, walk over to it, yank the power cord and steal it. This would be mitigated at least in part by the laptop's having a functional battery, being connected to the LAN via WiFi, and therefore having some more time to do it's thing even while being stolen.

 

In that case, my little fantasy is that the laptop's cam (one of the three cameras in use) gets a series of snapshots of the guy's face reasonably close-up. Putting a stopwatch on the FileZilla FTPs, I get .JPGs within seconds of the trigger, but when I force MP4's because of their larger size, can take up to several minutes - dependent, of course, on the length of the clip.

 

The bottom line being to have FTP's of at least a few clips before the laptop goes offline.

 

This will all become moot if/when I establish that BlueIris really cannot FTP Clips... only Alerts.... -)

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