Low fps in recorded videos

Hi,

I’ve just started using Netcam Studio with a good wifi camera (D-Link DCS-935L) after being testing it with a cheap usb old camera, and I have a problem. I’ve connected Netcam Studio to it using custom rtsp url, and while online image is fluid (15 fps, no problem), when you record video (motion detection or manually), first 2-3 seconds are fluid, but after fps drops down to 1-2 fps (while at bottom right Netcam still reports 15fps)… It must have something to do with encoding and saving process, but I don’t know. My machine is not that fast (quite old CPU) but this should lead to higher encoding times, but not affect fps… is it right?

I’ve tested with different quality settings inside camera config (currently I’m using 800x600 and 512 Kbps + audio), and I get some improvement, but I don’t understand why online video is fluid, and recorded one it’s not.

Thanks a lot.

Hi José,
If you are running the camera in high res. 1280x720 in 30 fps and do motion detect and save in that res/fps it will use resources of your computer. When you tell me “quite old CPU” I am getting very suspicious. An easy way to check this is to look at the Task manager and the CPU load. I think it will be rather high. 800x600 gives some improvement. Decrease that even further and see what is happening.
In Settings - Recording settings you can also test Image quality and images per second.
If you are connecting to the camera using rtsp and h.264 to get video and audio it will use a lot of resources since that format is highly compressed. Try to connect using MJPEG, only video. That format use more network bandwidth, but it use less resources of the computer since it is not that compressed.

Good luck,
Henrik

You’re right, I’m currently conecting to the h.264 rtsp stream, as I want audio to be recorded also (not using it for audio detection, though). So not an option to use MJPEG rtsp stream.

I’m running Netcam Studio 64bit in a HP N40L server (CPU Turion II Dual Core 1,50 GHz).

So you confirm it’s a matter of CPU power… I’ll do more investigations and watch Task Manager while recording… I’m currently testing the “Hardware_DXVA2” decoding, and I’ve got encoding configured as “fastest” preset, medium quality (CRF 30), 15 fps… We’ll see. I don’t mind disk usage. Could it be possible to record raw stream, with no compression?

Thanks a lot. Maybe I should upgrade CPU… but that’s difficult as it’s a rather old server/mainboard.

Raw stream is not possible since NCS is based on mp4. That processor is as you say quite old. There is another thing that you can test. In Settings and Recording, I think, you can enable background decoding. This will store the raw file in avi and then the ffmpeg will start decode to mp4 when processor in not so busy. I don’t know what will happen here, but test. The HP N40L is nice so check what cpu you can fit into that first.

Yes. I saw that setting and enabled it today… but I saw no difference. Anyway I don’t know if I did it right, as I can’t see the .avi videos… Maybe I should restart Netcam Studio Service after change that setting so it’s applied? I’ll test again.

Upgrading N40L server is a no go… CPU is soldered. I’ve just done some research, and found this… :frowning:

New Gen8 Microservers are cheap and ther’re upgradable, but I would be so time consuming doing a migration… and I don’t have that time. :frowning: Let’s see what I can do with what I have.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

A restart is a must. Also, check RAM. You need more than 2GB.

Good to know! It’s stated in GUI only if you change Decoding Library.

No RAM problem. I’ve got 2,5 free RAM, out of 6 GB.

I think I found good settings so I get fluid recordings… :slight_smile: They don’t have great quality… but will do the job.

Thanks a lot.

Ok, excellent. You are welcome.
Good luck,
Henrik