How Long Is a Blue Iris Video Clip
Camera Properties - Record
The Camera Properties Record tab determines whether or not images from the camera will be stored in the Clip List for later viewing, and how they will be formatted.
Profile
You may choose to edit one of seven profiles. Each profile consists of a completely separate configuration for the motion sensor as well as several video and snapshot recording options. The particular profile that is active at any given time is determined by settings on the global Schedule page, or if you prefer, the camera's own Schedule page. This feature allows you to implement a different motion sensor configuration based on the time of day and the day of the week. The currently active profile will be automatically selected for editing. Profiles are also color-coded: green is 1, blue is 2, red is 3, and so on. There are Copy and Paste buttons to make it convenient to copy one profile's configuration to another. To copy profile 1's settings to profile 2, edit profile 1, click Copy, then switch to profile 2 and click Paste. Use the Copy/paste to all button to quickly take the current profile settings and apply them to all 7 profiles.
There are profile buttons at the top of the Blue Iris window which show the current global schedule profile. If you press any of these buttons, it overrides BOTH the global schedule as well as the individual camera schedules for all cameras. Press the button once to temporarily force a particular profile, or press it twice to hold the profile indefinitely.
Record video
For each profile, you may choose how video will be recorded. You may choose from:
When triggered. Select if you want to record only when the camera is triggered by motion or another source.
Continuous. Select to record non-stop, which is desirable in some surveillance situations.
Only manual. Se lect if you do not want Blue Iris to record video unless you specifically request it using the toolbar icon.
Periodic (Every X minutes for Y seconds). Use this option to create evenly spaced recordings of a specific duration. If you specify a small duration (such as 0.1 seconds), the net effect is similar to that of the JPEG periodic recording, except you have the option of combining these images into a larger movie file by using the Combine or cut each option. Blue Iris will align the recording times if the period evenly divides a day. For example, if you select to record every 15 minutes, recordings will occur on the hour, and :15, :30 and :45 minutes past the hour.
Triggered + Periodic. Combines "when triggered" with period. If you set the duration to 0 seconds, a single frame will be captured. When used with the "combine or cut" option, the effect will be a time-lapse video with normal speed recording only when the camera is triggered.
Triggered + Continuous. This option is similar to the "Triggered + Periodic" mode with the important difference that the file is recorded at a normal playback rate and does not require "combine or cut" in order to create a continuously recorded file.
Snapshots
The option to Create an Alert image when triggered will save a low-resolution JPEG snapshot to the database whenever the camera is triggered. If a video is open for recording at that time, an offset into the file is also noted so that when this image is later viewed, it ill take you directly to the point of interest in the video. These are the images that will appear in the mobile client Alerts list. If you further select the option to Always create hi-res JPEG, a full-resolution file is saved to the Alerts folder.
In addition to video clips and Alert images, there's also and option to Create a JPEG snapshot on a timed basis. This will periodically save a still JPEG image to your New clips folder. Additionally, you may choose for this to happen only while the camera is triggered.
File options
Select the Mark new files for web archival option to automatically upload all new clips to your Options/Web archival FTP site.
Use the Protect new files from automatic storage and deletion option cautiously. This will prevent the system from automatically moving clips to the Stored folder or deleting them according to the rules on the Options/Clips page.
Filename
It is recommended that you allow Blue Iris to name clips automatically. If you choose to specify your own filename format, you should include time formatting codes for minutes and seconds (as well as year, month, day) in order to prevent existing clips from being overwritten as new ones are created. Notice that the default format also contains the "&CAM" macro at the beginning to distinguish files created by each camera on multiple-camera systems. Advanced users may add a subfolder specification to the beginning of the filename to automatically sort clips into folders based on the camera or the date. For example, if you add %Y%m%d\ to the beginning of the filename, a new folder will be created for each day. If you add &CAM\ the camera will have its own folder. Although not recommended, it is also possible to specify an absolute path here.
IMPORTANT : You must always retain the "&CAM." (note the . as well) at either the beginning of the filename segment of the path or at the end (".&CAM")--the software uses this to identify clips recorded by a particular camera.
Options
If you enable the Use alt framerate option, you can record single frames on a periodic basis. When you record video without audio at a framerate of less than 2fps, the playback framerate is set to 2fps. The effect is a "time lapse" where video will playback faster than real time.
Pre-trigger frame buffer size. Blue Iris maintains a buffer of images as they are received from the camera--when motion is detected, you may choose to record up to 150 images from this buffer so that you can see what occurred just prior to the event which actually triggered the motion sensor. Please note that the use of this feature consumes considerable memory and CPU resources--it should only be used if you have both to spare. In fact, it may be impractical if not impossible to use more than 5-10 frames here unless you are also using Direct-to-Disc recording (see below).
The Combine or cut each feature allows you to manage the number of movie files that Blue Iris creates. By default, without this option selected, a new movie is created when recording begins, and is closed when recording stops. That is, each time there is a trigger, and each time there is a "periodic" recording, there is also a new file created. You may then specify the maximum duration of the file in hours and minutes or total GB consumed. If your specified group time evenly divides the day (such as 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 hour intervals), then Blue Iris will align groups on these intervals. That is, when you start recording at 3:29pm with a 1 hour interval, a new clip will be opened at 4:00pm.
Note: while a clip is open for "recording" it will appear in the clip list without a thumbnail image if it's in AVI or WMV format. Once it is closed, it will appear and may then be viewed. If you wish to immediately view what's been recorded so far in an open clip, you may use the "traffic signal" command button in the toolbar to momentarily stop recording. All clips currently open for recording will be closed. The Blue Iris DVR (.bvr) file format does not suffer from this restriction--you may open the movie for viewing while it is simultaneously open for recording.
The Cut each time the motion sensor is triggered option forces the current movie to be closed and another created each time the motion sensor is triggered--the result is a hybrid of the Continuous and Motion sensor recording options.
A JPEG Quality setting allows you to control the JPEG compression, expressed as a percentage from 1 to 100. Low quality values equate to small files, but very noisy images.
Video File Format and Compression
Click the File format and compression button to open the video format window.
You may choose between AVI, Blue Iris DVR (.bvr), Windows Media (.wmv) or MPEG-4 (.mp4). Each format has its advantages.
The AVI container format is a legacy Video for Windows technology. They are limited to 1GB in size, and may not be viewed while open for writing. An AVI file may contain video that has been encoded using H.264, MJPEG, XVID, etc. Windows Media Player will not be able to open these AVI file unless the proper decoder has been installed. It is recommend that you install the K-Lite codec pack from codecguide.com in order to play these AVI files on your system.
The Blue Iris DVR format allows videos to be read and written simultaneously, as well as for videos to exceed 1GB, both of which are limitations of the AVI file format. The Blue Iris DVR format is also a highly-efficient flat-file format as opposed to the RIFF structure found in AVI files. You should consider using this format when creating large video files or when you need to access the video while it is still open for writing. Before the content of a Blue Iris DVR file may be played on a PC without Blue Iris, you must Edit the clip as described in the Working with Clips topic in order to create an interchangeable format file (MP4 or WMV).
The Windows Media and MPEG-4 formats, although the least efficient to record, are also the most portable and provide the most precise control over compression settings for advanced users.
When you choose AVI or Blue Iris DVR, you may select the video encoder (codec). Currently, you may choose from either H.264 (the default), MJPG (no temporal compression), or XVID if you have that installed from xvid.org.
The XVID MPEG4 codec may be preferred on slower systems, or on systems where you will be recording from many cameras at once, and you find that your CPU utilization is too high with the H.264 codec. Install XVID from xvid.org and XVID will then appear on the list of video encoders.
The MJPG codec used by Blue Iris was installed automatically for you as well. The MJPG codec is highly efficient in terms of CPU usage, but not very efficient in terms of hard disk space consumed (because each frame is a key frame). One limitation of this codec over the others is that only "standard" frame dimensions can be compressed--the video height must be a multiple of 16, and large dimensions, such as a screen capture of 1280x800 may in fact crash the MJPG codec. When you select the MJPG codec, you may then specify a quality setting (from 1 to 100%).
A Key frame is a complete frame. All other images that are captured into the movie file are incomplete, and consist merely of the "changes" since the previous frame. This compression technique is called "temporal" compression, and allows for more efficient use of the hard disk. The only real drawback to using key frames and temporal compression comes when you try to do random access on the frames. You will notice that if you create a movie with a key frame every 2 or 3 seconds or so, that when you move the video slider bar to randomly access the movie, it may not move as smoothly as it had before you changed these settings. Playback and forward stepping, however, will not be affected.
If you choose to capture Windows Media files, you should click the Configure button to configure the video and audio codecs.
For optimal quality and performance, you should choose the Windows Media V8 for video, and version 10 for audio, and then select a suitable Audio format. The combination of audio and video bit rates (in kbps, kilobytes per second) closely determines the amount of hard drive storage used.
The Offset stream audio option may be used to account for a constant audio/video sync problem if one is identified.
H.264 Encoder Profiles
You may select and configure three H.264 encoder profiles to be used for recording. Select the profile and then click Configure.
The Quality setting when set at 50% is designed to produce visually lossless output. You may increase this value to further refine the output or lower it as necessary to reduce hard drive space used.
When the encoder is used for streaming, you should enable the Rate control option for Max bitrate. This option will insure that the outbound network bandwidth falls below a specified value in order to provide a smooth streaming experience.
You may also select a Maximum keyframe interval, also known as the Group of Pictures (GOP). When streaming, using a higher value is acceptable as it raises the quality/bandwidth equation. When recording, however, this value directly affects file seeking (random access) times and efficiency and should be kept relatively low at the expense of using additional storage resources. B-frames offer further advanced compression technology, at the expense of some output latency (delay).
Under Advanced you may select an encoding Preset. The "faster" presets will use less CPU, while the "slower" presets will produce a higher quality output.
Use the Zero frame latency option along with 0 b-frames in order to produce encoder output that is closest to real-time, which may be desirable for streaming. However if you can tolerate some latency, leaving this option un-checked will produce significantly higher quality output.
Direct-To-Disc
Advanced users may wish to experiment with the Direct-To-Disc feature. Instead of recompressing the video for recording, an attempt is made to save the exact stream as received from the camera. This may not be used with the Windows Media container format, and only H.264 streams are appropriate for the MP4 file format at this time.
Where this technology will be invaluable is for the recording of HD and larger frame video, as recompressing these formats is highly CPU-intensive. The down-side to using direct-to-disc is that you will not be able to add graphic and time overlays such as the time-stamp. You will need to rely upon the camera to add these itself. Also, recording must begin at the arrival of a key-frame (complete image). If your camera sends these only infrequently, you may miss the beginning of some motion-activated recordings unless you also use the pre-trigger video buffer.
It is possible there are camera streams yet to be discovered which are not fully compatible with this recording method--if you require assistance please contact the developer.
Source: https://www.houselogix.com/docs/blue-iris/BlueIris/recording.htm
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