View recordings

[James Sentman]

Hello Dave!

I am very glad to hear it’s working for you! On my own systems and those of my local friends who have let me sabotage… I mean automate their homes ;) it is reducing over all CPU usage while keeping everything running at least as well as it did before.

The .recording file is the temporary file that it saves the video to in realtime prior to encoding into an h264 mp4 file that can be more easily saved and shared or uploaded or viewed in a browser or whatever you wish to do.

There are 2 ways that the new video stuff processes such files into the right thing for viewing. The default way requires that you also setup an instance of the “Video Encoder” plugin. Just one instance of it in your Interface list window is enough. If that does not exist you should be getting an error in the log about there being no queue to process something or other I can’t remember. You’d see that error every time a recording was finished. With that plugin running (which uses no CPU when not actively processing a video) any recording that has created a .recording file will pass it off to the encoder plugin and then start a new one if needed. The encoder plugin will begin encoding it to a standard mp4 file and then delete the .recording file when it is sure that everything is finished and working.

The second option is useful if you have a recording that needs to be big enough or high frame rate enough that the batch processing cannot do it in better than realtime on your CPU and it would get behind until it would never finish the encodings. This is possible on older machines or machines with a LOT of video streams. This starts up the encoder when recording begins and hands off the frames one by one to it. When the recording is done instead of starting the encoding then it will just finalize what it’s already done which means the file is probably ready in just a few seconds even on the slowest machine. I would not check that box unless it actually means something or the CPU is so slow that batch encoding is getting behind.

So make sure you have also setup an instance of the Video Encoder plugin and that it is enabled. Then all those .recording files will turn into standard mp4 files shortly after the recording is finished.

once you’ve done that, disable and re-enable the actual video plugin and it will scan it’s folders of saved video snippets and if it finds any .recording files it will queue them up for encoding then. This means that in your case there will probably be a LOT of them to start with and it will take some time to complete, but you haven’t lost any of those recordings and they will catch up.

Let me know if that doesn’t happen or if there are any other angry red items in the log that sound exciting. While I’m using this myself now it is still fairly new so it’s entirely possible there are errors cropping up that I had no idea could happen ;) As so often happens...


> On Dec 28, 2022, at 1:23 PM, Dave Fleck <dfleck at pacifier.com> wrote:
> 
> I’ve been playing with the new Video additions (LOVE them), and I can view live and get it to store a .recording file at the selected location. But what application do I use to view a .recording file?

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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