USB camera recordings using large amount of space.

Hello all, I have been running into an issue with two of my cameras taking up a large amount of space on my drive recording video. the two cameras in question are a couple of older USB cameras that are connected to another PC and are being broadcasted over lan via yawcam app. what I am seeing is a single video file (bvr) taking up 4gb within about 5 minutes and filling up my drive. What I believe I am running into is the app yawcam is not able to dial down the resolution and video quality being broadcasted to BI.

I am on the hunt for another streaming service for these two cameras that can dial back these settings. I have tried both VLC and OBS studio and can't seem to get them to work at all. was thinking about trying Crowsnest which is used mainly on 3D printers running klipper, but it has the ability to set the desired video resolution and frame rates on the camera feed. Not unless there is some sort of setting in BI I'm missing that can be changed so that the recorded file is not so large.

in BI settings I have all cameras set to cut the video files on 1 hour increments or when they reach 4gb in size, all of my other "real" ip cameras rarely reach that file size within an hour unless there is a high amount of activity (motion)

with a total of 11 cameras recording 24/7 I used to be able to store about 3-4 days of footage on the BI PC at one time but now I can't even store a full days worth, on top of lately BI has been randomly shutting down when it goes to clearing space or moving some of the footage to an external storage, it looses or corrupts files and the internal drive will fill up stopping all recording on all cameras.

The two USB cameras are recording in the inside of the house and don't have any alerts set, they are mainly for viewing in the timeline when I want to monitor my pets or if someone from outside comes to the door and I want to see what's happening as a visitor enters. neither of these cameras need to have a high resolution or video quality.

if anyone has any suggestions for a simple camera streaming app that can broadcast over lan or if there are settings in BI I am missing for recording quality Please let me know. I would really appreciate it.

Bruce_H said:

To the best of my knowledge; BI does not have any ability to control the video resolution; that is set by the camera itself or the device providing the video feed! Does the feed for these cameras show in the status window on the camera tab, if so then it will tell you the video resolution it is receiving! It would be good if we knew what version of BI are you using!

Click to expand...

BI version 5.9.9.9 and here is a screenshot of the camera’s status. The two in particular are named Front Door Left and Living Room
I don’t see anything for resolution but I do see those two having the highest bitrate. I do know the front door left is only a 640x480 in size and the other one is in HD. 1920x1280. Funny thing is there is a third usb camera that is the same as the front door left called Front Door Right that is directly connected to the BI pc and it isn’t an issue. I don’t think it’s the cameras but the data being sent over lan from the other pc.

I may try running crowsnest from the 3d printer klipper install and see if it allows me to change to h264 or lessen the bitrate. the app yawcam that I'm using to stream the camera feed to BI now only does mjepg. Crowsnest is configurable via the command line plus I'm a little more familiar with it. after all what do I have loose here trying LOL

Well trying out crowsnest failed, could not get the camera feeds to show up in BI for whatever reason. I did however finally get the bitrate on both cameras down to about 1000kb/s but I'm still seeing 4gb files created before the hour cut time is up.

while working with this I ran across a new problem of random crashing and corrupting the database. I've always had the random crash issue and never was able to figure it out. this started back when I had BI on an older PC with a 3rd gen intel cpu. since upgrading several months ago to a pc with a 6th gen intel the crashes are farther and fewer in between, but still happens. Well I have the storage settings set so that all of the new footage is moved to storage which is my NAS so that I can keep more than a days worth of footage. Not sure if this is the issue, but BI has been crashing more and more lately and when it does, when it comes back online, the storage logs are reporting "other" files on the SSD that I have dedicated to all the new recordings, then fills up and doesn't move any files over to the nas. it also will report overallocated

I am actually considering maybe setting up BI in a VM on my NAS server so it would have pleanty of hdd space to hold footage. I already have the AI running in a docker on one of the server machines. both of my NAS servers are Dell R720's with 128gb ram and dual 12 core xeon cpu's. I could keep the AI running on one and have the other server run the VM for BI just to equal out the load. Also attempt to troubleshoot what is causing the random crashes. I have always had windows 10 operating with BI, I could then experiment with other versions of windows as well to see. iirc the windows logs would show a random exception call and would close BI, it wasn't anything to do with CPU or ram usage that I remember.