Question about the timelaps function

palulf
palulf
edited October 2015 in SecuritySpy
Hi again,
Thank you for the timelaps function in SS.
It works great with our 5 megapixel Aote Tek IP camera bought on eBay.

Is it possible to have SS overwrite the last timelaps movie (as an option) instead of always creating new ones?
Our website is a Wordpress site and it would be great to be able to link to the latest timelaps by just linking to one file name. New movie files will also be too much for our limited web space on the server. 20GB.

Thank you,
Paul, Norway

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben
    edited October 2015
    Hi Paul,

    I'm afraid this is not possible with SecuritySpy, which is designed for video surveillance where you want to keep the files around for as long as possible. Additionally, SecuritySpy's folder structure, which organises the files and makes them easy to find by date and time, means that writing a script to locate the latest file and delete the old files, while possible in theory, would be difficult and possibly unreliable.

    However, what you want is quite easy with our other product SwiftCapture and a bit of AppleScript. SwiftCapture has simple AppleScript commands to start/stop timelapse movies to a specific file path. So what you would do is something like this:

    repeat
        tell application "SwiftCapture"
            start timelapse capture to file "/users/ben/Documents/timelapse_temp.mov"
        end tell

        delay 3600

        tell application "SwiftCapture"
            stop capture
        end tell

        delay 2

        tell application "System Events"
            try
                delete file "/users/ben/Documents/timelapse_final.mov"
            end try
            try
                set the name of the file "/users/ben/Documents/timelapse_temp.mov" to "timelapse_final.mov"
            end try
        end tell
    end repeat

    This creates hourly timelapse movies, and sets the name to "timelapse_final.mov" in the Documents folder. The "delay 2" after the "stop capture" command is to allow a couple of seconds for SwiftCapture to completely finish off the movie file before it is used, as this process is asynchronous.

    Copy and paste the above into a new script in the AppleScript Editor application, and edit the timings, paths and filenames as required.

    Hope this helps - let me know if you need any further information.
  • palulf
    palulf
    edited October 2015
    Hi Ben,
    We thought about it after posting.
    We understand SS is made for surveillance matters and it makes sense not to overwrite.

    Yes, we will try this script. Thank you for writing it. SwiftCapture downloaded!
    Is SwiftCapture onvif IP camera ready? "No video devices available"

    We realized our IP camera has a built in server when we finally got through to it (via PC) and can ftp images by itself. We can then get away by only running SwiftCapture on the MacMini for the time lapses. This is great, but at the moment we can´t connect to our camera.

    Thanks again,
    Paul
  • Ben
    Ben
    Hi Paul,

    My apologies, I missed the fact that you are using an IP camera! SwiftCapture unfortunately doesn't support IP cameras at this time - it supports built-in, FireWire, USB, and Thunderbolt devices.

    With SecuritySpy, there is no easy way to achieve what you want, unless you write a script that automatically scans the SecuritySpy "Captured files" folder for new files and moves them to your web folder. I'm sure it's possible, but won't be easy to get right and this is not something we already have a script for.

    Alternatively, you could get SecuritySpy to automatically upload completed timelapse to your web server via FTP, and then write a perl/ruby script that checks for these periodically (cron) and renames and moves them to the "live" web folder where they will be available for viewing.

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