Very confused by the Time line.

[Stev Wolf]

I'm very confused on the time line. This is an older version V 4.8.6.3 W32.
I have read the documentation and tried to understand it but I do not.

Here is a link.

I understand that each colour represents a camera. I have 2. Pink and Blue . I have seen were for large periods of time for example the BLUE line in some cases a day or more there is no blue line.
If there is activity on the Blue camera it just shows the walking man with a little red to indicate lengle I guess. I sort of thought it was to do with Recording and when the files were cut, say every 8 hours. However the blue line will not start up unless there is activity then it will will start showing for the rest of its time, say 7 or t he 8 hours. The think is that t he pink line seems to show up generally all the time.

Anyway Its confusing to me. Can someone help me to understand this.

Thank you.

 

[Bruce_H]

Sorry I have never used or installed BI V4; Blue Iris 5 was released on May 31, 2019. You are using a version that might be 6 years old, I hope that there are some people here that remember how V 4 works!

 

[Stev Wolf]

Sorry I have never used or installed BI V4; Blue Iris 5 was released on May 31, 2019. You are using a version that might be 6 years old, I hope that there are some people here that remember how V 4 works!

Thanks. Yes its old but then why fix what is not broken. running on Win 7 old computer. Works fine. So the new version dont have this I guess ?

 

[bp2008]

The timeline in Blue Iris 5 still works quite similarly to how it did in Blue Iris 4. Just looks a little different but otherwise works very similarly.

The colored bars on the timeline show time spans where there is a video clip from a camera with that color.

HOWEVER it appears you are using Blue Iris's default recording configuration, or something much like it. And that has a weird quirk. In the default configuration, BI records on trigger/alert, and the "Combine or cut" checkbox is checked (in Camera settings > Record tab) with a clip duration of 8 hours. This means the colored bars on your timeline end up being rather misleading. For example in your screenshot above, at about 12:20 AM, a blue camera was triggered and Blue Iris began a new video "clip". At that moment, a tiny blue bar would have appeared on your timeline, with the person graphic below it and a little red line running through it indicating there was an alert at that moment. Then at around 2:10 AM, the same camera was triggered again. Because this was within 8 hours after the start of the clip, this video was recorded into the same video clip that was started nearly two hours previously. At that moment, the blue bar on the timeline grows suddenly from its previous very small size, to span the entire distance between the two trigger points (nearly 2 hours). Even though that clip only contains a few seconds of actual video, it now appears to be hours long. More triggers after 3 AM again cause the blue bar to be extended two more times.

Evidence suggests there were no more triggers from the blue camera in the following several hours. Evidence suggests that there were no triggers on a pink camera between 12 AM and 4 AM. This does not indicate that anything is actually wrong. Blue Iris is very complex software which could certainly be configured to achieve the result you showed.

 

[Stev Wolf]

Thanks well I sort thought it was sorta like that. However I have gone a long time with no blue camera showing up. Im sure there was activity there. I know its complex software. I sort of wondered if I clicked some button by mistake and that changed the way this worked. I have done that before.

 

[bp2008]

The clip database can get corrupted pretty easily (particularly if your BI crashes very often), and that can have all manner of strange effects making clips or alerts not appear. Check your storage status and make sure there's no overallocation happening -- that is sometimes a sign of database corruption.

If you are okay with losing your alert markers, you can try right clicking a clip in the clip list and choose database > delete & regenerate. This will totally rebuild the clip database by scanning the video files on disk, and fix any corruption that may be there. Note that this can take potentially hours to complete, during which BI will not be able to record anything. So you don't want to just regenerate the database without a good reason.

 

[Stev Wolf]

Thanks I will take a look at that.