Digital Recorders using Personal Computers are a large improvement over tape systems. Systems such as IVISTA from InetCam offer a reasonably priced system with the ability to both record up to four security cameras simultaneously on a computer and at the same time allow viewing of the four cameras from anywhere via the internet.
One major problem with IVISTA and a number of other such programs is that they put all of the image files in a single directory (folder) and after a few weeks at one frame per second, as many as 3600 x 24 x 14 or 1,209,600 frames will be in the folder. In 60 days, you would have about 5 million frames. When you get more than <maybe> 10,000 frames in a folder, searching for a particular video sequence becomes impossible with common frame viewer programs. Most of them "lock up" or worse, "crash" the computer. I could not find a commercial solution to this problem and so I invented the following solution.
1) I set up IVISTA to store all of its pictures in the folder (for
example) C:\parkpics\pictures. IVISTA stores one frame per second
in this PICTURES folder. I have three other similar directories set
up for my other three cameras.
2) Each hour, I move all of the pictures gathered in the prior
hour to a newly created folder MMDDHH where MM=month, DD=day of the
month, and HH = hour of the day the pictures were recorded.
The new folder name would be c:\parkpics\032218 if the images were
recorded on March 22 during the 1800 hour period. In my case, this
folder would contain 3600 images.
3) An option allows the program to automatically ERASE images older
than <say> 60 days. (User adjustable). In this way, a user
can store security camera images for <say> the last 1, 2, 7,
14, 16, 21, 30, 45, or 60 days and images older than
that will automatically be deleted.
Since each folder (MMDDHH) has the 3600 images from just one hour, if you know the approximate time an event occurred, you can search each camera's image file for that time period rapidly using any of a number of frame viewing programs. IfanView is the viewer I use but there are many that will work.
The program has the ability to:
a) Allow the user to sort a large ALREADY EXISTING folder with many
weeks of images and sort these into hourly groups.
b) Allows the user to run the program once per hour to generate
a new folder each hour.
c) Automatically erases the PICTURES folder of files moved to the
hourly folder.
d) Maintain the date/time stamp on the original frame when the frame
is moved to a new folder.
e) Maintains a log file indicating running times and any errors
which were encountered.
f) Allows the user to set a number of days to maintain the image
files after which the outdated frames are automatically deleted.
If there is enough interest in this program, I will write up a manual and offer this program for $15 or less to anyone who can use it. The program runs ONLY on Windows 2000, NT and XP.
Please contact Joe Mehaffey if interested.
Thanks