"Our ability to respond quickly to an incident is of utmost importance and our system allows rapid retrieval of video from any server or camera by time, date or motion events."
B. King, Supervisor Teleproduction and CCTV Systems, Conroe ISD.

Stable Recording Architecture

 

The recording architecture a Video Management System uses to store video, audio and associated meta-data can have a big impact on the system's usability and the integrity of video data..

Most video management systems employ a database to record this information. A database keeps all the dissimilar data in a single file, or small set of files, and allows for easy indexing and association

The database format can, however, cause some issues specific to video recording. Recording high frame rates over many cameras requires a high number of ‘writes’ to the database which can create opportunities for the database to become corrupted. Common factors which result in database corruption:

  • Poor structuring of the software that interfaces with the database.
  • Power outages.
  • Interruptions or crashes during the writing of data.

When a database becomes corrupt in a video management system the VMS must attempt to rebuild the database in order to access the recordings and to continue recording new video. This process involves reading all the data in the database in an attempt to rebuild or remove missing data or structural information. The process often takes hours because of the volume of information to sort through and new video will often not be recorded while the repair is occurring.

If the repair process fails, all the information in the database may be deleted because it has become unusable.

To avoid these issues CompleteView uses a unique recording architecture which stores video in a flat file structure outside of a database. CompleteView uses a database which is linked to the video for storage of meta data. Video is also stored in 3 minute segments, lowering the possibility of any significant portion of a video clip becoming unreadable.

Long database repairs and corruption of video after a power loss or other interruption of the video management application are not a problem with CompleteView. For more information on recording architectures commonly employed in video surveillance please see our white paper, Modular vs. Database Dependant Design.