'Bad movie data header' errors

Gregory

for the last 3 or 4 days, I have been getting several of these errors every day:
'Error opening existing movie file "2020-10-16 11 C Strawberries.m4v". 5.2.6,11635,73830,50880 Bad movie data header.'

the free space situation of my hard drive hasn't changed for many months.

the files show as:
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~1.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~2.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~3.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~4.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~5.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~6.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~7.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~8.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~9.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~10.m4v
2020-10-16 12 C Strawberries~11.m4v

only the first file can be opened. the other files are not zero-byte files.

SS was updated several days ago. could the errors be related to the update?
"Version 5.2.6 - 8 October 2020
Fixes problem causing live video corruption"

I exported my SS settings, deleted SS and all its supporting files, re-installed it and imported the settings (great feature btw), but the problems continue. it doesn't happen with every movie capture. just some. but it happens every day.

any ideas?

cheers
Gregory

SS 5.2.6
OS X 10.15.7 (19H2)

Gregory

the log states:

2020/10/17 22:04:45: Error creating captured file for camera "Apples". 5.2.6,11430,50605,28 Failed to finish recording. No space left on device.
2020/10/17 22:04:45: Error performing continuous capture for camera "Apples", continuous capture mode will now be disarmed. 5.2.6,1556,28 Failed to record video frame. No space left on device.
2020/10/17 22:05:31: Error opening existing movie file "2020-10-17 22 C Strawberries.m4v". 5.2.6,11635,73830,50880 Bad movie data header.
2020/10/17 22:05:43: Error opening existing movie file "2020-10-17 22 C Avocados.m4v". 5.2.6,11635,73830,50880 Bad movie data header.
2020/10/17 22:05:52: Error opening existing movie file "2020-10-17 22 C Mangos.mov". 5.2.6,11635,73830,50880 Bad movie data header.
2020/10/17 22:05:56: Error opening existing movie file "2020-10-17 22 C Apples.mov". 5.2.6,11635,73830,50880 Bad movie data header.

Gregory

could I be seeing these problems because the files are being written to an APFS volume which is running low on space?

Gregory

the SS volume was one of three (actually 9) in the startup volume APSF container. in a APSF container, space is shared among all volumes. the startup volume also contained 12 invisible Time Machine local snapshots that the system doesn’t report but actually do impact free space on the container.

i’m in the process of deleting the SS volume from the Startup APSF container and recreating it as a separate HFS+ volume. i think only then will SS be able to reliably delete files when there’s less than the specified free space and write new ones.

Ben

The problem here seems to be lack of free space on the drive. If the drive is full, a file will be created but no data can be written to it. Subsequently, when SecuritySpy goes to open the file again to continue to record to it, it encounters an unexpected header (because there was no header written initially due to lack of free space).

As you say, this could very well be due to the shared free space and Time Machine snapshots. I think your plan to set up an HFS+ volume dedicated to SecuritySpy is a good idea. Ideally this should be on an entirely separate physical disk (e.g. an external USB 3 drive).