Now that EGPUs are supported, is there a recommended one?
First, I have a question. Does Security Spy only recompress recordings, or is video accessed live through other means from a Security Spy RTSP stream also the recompressed video?
Second, is there a recommended EGPU? My 2018 Mac mini 3.2 Ghz 6 Core Intel Core i7 handles the 23 cameras I have running on it surprisingly well right now, but I'm always looking to increase performance as I add new cameras.
I would love to recompress everything into H265 and use the text overlay built in to Security Spy so all of my cameras look the same.
Second, is there a recommended EGPU? My 2018 Mac mini 3.2 Ghz 6 Core Intel Core i7 handles the 23 cameras I have running on it surprisingly well right now, but I'm always looking to increase performance as I add new cameras.
I would love to recompress everything into H265 and use the text overlay built in to Security Spy so all of my cameras look the same.
Comments
However, I would strongly recommend against recompression, especially attempting to recompress so many cameras to H.265 - this would use a huge amount of CPU resources and just wouldn't work well, even on the most powerful Mac, even with an eGPU for help.
We don't have any specific eGPU recommendations beyond apple's document Use an external graphics processor with your Mac, however, we have seen good results with Vega cards.
Note that, at the moment, SecuritySpy can use an eGPU to assist video decoding, but not encoding. This is because decoding is the primary resource-intensive task that SecuritySpy needs to do. We may add support for eGPU encoding in a future update, depending on adoption of eGPUs by our customers.
And it would be great to have full support for the eGPU. I will buy one for my new 2020 mac mini to have better GPU performance.
SecuritySpy still needs to decompress the incoming video streams from the cameras in order to do motion detection, display cameras to the screen, generate web server streams etc. and this is where an eGPU can really boost performance, if the Mac's internal video decompression hardware is struggling to cope.
Typically, the "recompress video data" option will be turned off for all cameras, and in this case, the main video compression tasks that SecuritySpy has to do would be recording for any non-network camera (e.g. USB/Thunderbolt/FaceTime cameras), and to generate H.264 video streams to send via its web interface for remote viewing.
The latest beta version of SecuritySpy (currently 5.2.7b1) now adds support for eGPU compression as well as decompression. More information is in this FAQ: Can SecuritySpy use External GPU (eGPU) devices to boost performance?
One more question to the above topic.
Is it correct that if i choose one of the video formats in the chooser (H264, H265, ProRes) this will be the format of the files recorded uncompressed to the hdd? I did change it from H264 to H265 (in the prefereces, compression) to save space on my hdd and did believe after testing that it had a effect on the written files, smaller sizes, or is this not the case?.......
To further clarify: with the "Recompress video data" turned off, the video is still compressed by the camera, so this compressed video is saved by SecuritySpy to disk, and should already be fairly efficient in terms of storage space. It's just not recompressed by SecuritySpy.
Stuttering issues should also be better in the beta. If it's the motion detection that is causing the stuttering, then it could be the AI that is causing this, as this is the thing that potentially uses a lot of CPU. The best solution here is to limit the use of the AI when you don't need it, and adjust the standard motion detection to be as effective as possible, so that fewer images need to be analysed by the AI (see Achieving Effective Motion Detection).