Jittery stored video problem solved
I've had a very long-standing (years) problem with motion detection events being "jittery" - they will pause for 3-4 seconds and I will lose the data during the pause. This was very frustrating, as it seemed to be specifically a problem with stored videos - the same cameras were showing fluid motion (25fps) at all times even during capture. This was particularly bad with my 1080p cameras, and I assumed it was a data rate problem.
I figured it out. I'm using an external 1TB USB drive, a cheap one. Apparently using the standard MacOS journaled file system is a bit too much for it. I did a bunch of reading (don't even remember the URLs now) but the upshot was that I reformatted the drive as a ExFAT (Windows) and... presto! Problem solved. Videos are stored with no loss or jitter.
I am 99.9% sure this was the solution, because I changed nothing other than that reformatted drive. Of course, your mileage may vary.
JT
I figured it out. I'm using an external 1TB USB drive, a cheap one. Apparently using the standard MacOS journaled file system is a bit too much for it. I did a bunch of reading (don't even remember the URLs now) but the upshot was that I reformatted the drive as a ExFAT (Windows) and... presto! Problem solved. Videos are stored with no loss or jitter.
I am 99.9% sure this was the solution, because I changed nothing other than that reformatted drive. Of course, your mileage may vary.
JT
Comments
-
Hi JT,
This is very interesting, and surprising! Mac OS Journaled is generally the best format to use when preparing a drive for use with a Mac. Perhaps it was simply the re-format itself that resolved the problem? An empty newly-formatted drive is always going to perform better than one that is full of data. If you re-format the drive as Mac OS Journaled again do you still see the problem? -
Not sure. I'll reformat here in a bit. I've noticed now one of the cameras is starting to exhibit the symptoms again during write operations, but not others.
