[XTension] XTension Beta Build Available fixes to Video disk space management

[james at sentman.com]

Hi Folks,

Still healing slowly here, my lungs continue to hold a grudge even though the virus packed up and left weeks ago now. I am also holding a grudge against them as they are making my life far more difficult than it should otherwise be. I can feel that every nights sleep is better than the previous and every morning is better than the previous one and being able to actually see that is very encouraging! i am not so old that I should be so sick! Back to masking in public for me as this can’t be allowed to happen again if there are any ways to avoid or reduce it’s chances! Ugh… Stay well out there friends! I know I haven’t answered much in the way of email support in a while now, i’ll be getting back to it all shortly. 

In other news I did complete some needed work on the disk space management portion of the new video system. In the current release the disk space scanning that is supposed to delete the oldest files in the recording directories may not work or may just throw errors in the log and give up. That is fixed for the beta build and so anyone relying on that should consider running the beta version before their disks need any pruning. If you are against beta versions the other option is to run Video Pitcher in the background with all the video streams disabled. It will continue to manage it’s recording folder and keep the space available what you set in it’s preferences even if it is not streaming anything. Note that Video Pitcher only supports a single root folder for all it’s recordings that is managed, so if you have restructured your video recording folders then this may not work.

There are no other changes in this beta except the fixes to the disk space management so it should not introduce any new issues. It makes no changes to the database structure so you should not need the automatically created database backup, but in case you do one is made the first time you launch this just like always. There are also instructions on the beta page for turning on the Debug menu in XTension, From there you can turn on specific debug logging for the disk space management so you could see in the log exactly what it thinks it’s doing and what files it’s deleting. So if you have any questions about what it’s doing you can turn that on until they are either satisfied or you can tell me why it’s not doing what you expected. I have the new code running on my own server as well as my local friends who also run the software and so far I have not seen anything else remaining broken about that.

https://www.machomeautomation.com/doku.php/current/beta

For the next couple of betas of the next release I’ll be concentrating on some other things that need doing in the video subsystem. I need to find a way to trap some of the lower level errors that are logged from the decoder libraries that don’t always break the decoding but do fill the log with errors. Sometimes there are partial frame decodes that yield a broken image, but it’s still a valid image so the upper level stuff doesn’t realize that there is a problem with the stream and it needs to restart it so you might get nothing, or garbage frames and a log full of errors but the plugin itself isn’t aware that anything is wrong. Why they dont throw an error up stream like everything else I’m not sure but I’ve got some thoughts on how to fix it. I also need to clean up some of the orphaned recording processing. At startup it looks for recordings that may have been in progress when the program quit or where otherwise left behind. Most of them are already processed properly, but sometimes the lack of some of the support files can cause that to fail and so it tries to re-encode them every time the plugin restarts.  I have also found a kind of amcrest camera that does not seem to do the event processing in the same way as the ones I tested with so I’ve got collecting some more info from that on my list so that I can fixup the amcrest camera API support to properly handle that. If anyone has other camera types that should be able to be controlled more through XTension, or that have info available about motion or other detection that is not supported please let me know and I’ll add them to the list as well. Pretty much any camera can at least get some rudimentary controls of video, and most might be able to expose pretty much everything thats available. Thats next and then back to fixing up existing plugins and tweaking some of the other stuff we’ve been talking about. 



Thanks folks!
  James


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