Feature Request: Very Large Precapture Feature

Description

I am trying to use it to watch the entire front yard. The typical event begins with very small objects (people or cars) entering from the side or from a far distance. It is difficult to tune the program to detect and capture these small changes without causing false detections. It would be nice to just look for a significant event and have a large precapture buffer to record all of the small activities that preceeded the trigger (let's say several minutes). One other benefit of this approach would be that the motion detection algorythm could be fairly simple as we are only looking for big changes. The large precap would work nicely for another proposed change where an external trigger could begin the recording. I realize that a precapture buffer presents a memory problem. Is it feasible to constantly encode the video to mpeg4, and thereby reduce the size of information that is buffered? Perhaps constantly writing to disk?

-- TWikiGuest - 01 Jan 2006

Follow up

Comments

I too would love such a feature.

-- RomanGaufman - 10 Jul 2007

---

Up to version 3.2.8, precapturing a larger number of frames is not only a memory problem, but a CPU load and timing problem as well. The latest SVN version (and finally version 3.2.9) has addressed the CPU load problem. You can now easily use a larger number of pre_capture frames without loosing any frames. But you will still need enough memory to store the ring buffer. Just give the latest SVN version a try and check out if it works for you. The code is stable enough to run it in a production environment.

There is no plan today to further extend the pre_capture capabilities beyond this point.

-- JoergWeber - 30 Sep 2007

---