Commit Graph

16 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Scott Lamb
d0c7bb0b9c fix broken link to on-demand section 2021-05-15 21:53:36 -07:00
Scott Lamb
4d4d78ba64 mass markdown reformatting
Add tables of contents (using the VS Code Markdown All-In-One extension)
and reformat lists to consistently use 4-space indents. No content
changes.
2021-04-01 12:32:31 -07:00
Scott Lamb
f3ddbfe22a track cumulative duration and runs
This is useful for a combo scrub bar-based UI (#32) + live view UI (#59)
in a non-obvious way. When constructing a HTML Media Source Extensions
API SourceBuffer, the caller can specify a "mode" of either "segments"
or "sequence":

In "sequence" mode, playback assumes segments are added sequentially.
This is good enough for a live view-only UI (#59) but not for a scrub
bar UI in which you may want to seek backward to a segment you've never
seen before. You will then need to insert a segment out-of-sequence.
Imagine what happens when the user goes forward again until the end of
the segment inserted immediately before it. The user should see the
chronologically next segment or a pause for loading if it's unavailable.
The best approximation of this is to track the mapping of timestamps to
segments and insert a VTTCue with an enter/exit handler that seeks to
the right position. But seeking isn't instantaneous; the user will
likely briefly see first the segment they seeked to before. That's
janky. Additionally, the "canplaythrough" event will behave strangely.

In "segments" mode, playback respects the timestamps we set:

* The obvious choice is to use wall clock timestamps. This is fine if
  they're known to be fixed and correct. They're not. The
  currently-recording segment may be "unanchored", meaning its start
  timestamp is not yet fixed. Older timestamps may overlap if the system
  clock was stepped between runs. The latter isn't /too/ bad from a user
  perspective, though it's confusing as a developer. We probably will
  only end up showing the more recent recording for a given
  timestamp anyway. But the former is quite annoying. It means we have
  to throw away part of the SourceBuffer that we may want to seek back
  (causing UI pauses when that happens) or keep our own spare copy of it
  (memory bloat). I'd like to avoid the whole mess.

* Another approach is to use timestamps that are guaranteed to be in
  the correct order but that may have gaps. In particular, a timestamp
  of (recording_id * max_recording_duration) + time_within_recording.
  But again seeking isn't instantaneous. In my experiments, there's a
  visible pause between segments that drives me nuts.

* Finally, the approach that led me to this schema change. Use
  timestamps that place each segment after the one before, possibly with
  an intentional gap between runs (to force a wait where we have an
  actual gap). This should make the browser's natural playback behavior
  work properly: it never goes to an incorrect place, and it only waits
  when/if we want it to. We have to maintain a mapping between its
  timestamps and segment ids but that's doable.

This commit is only the schema change; the new data aren't exposed in
the API yet, much less used by a UI.

Note that stream.next_recording_id became stream.cum_recordings. I made
a slight definition change in the process: recording ids for new streams
start at 0 rather than 1. Various tests changed accordingly.

The upgrade process makes a best effort to backfill these new fields,
but of course it doesn't know the total duration or number of runs of
previously deleted rows. That's good enough.
2020-06-09 16:17:32 -07:00
Scott Lamb
00991733f2 use Blake3 instead of SHA-1 or Blake2b
Benefits:

* Blake3 is faster. This is most noticeable for the hashing of the
  sample file data.
* we no longer need OpenSSL, which helps with shrinking the binary size
  (#70). sha1 basically forced OpenSSL usage; ring deliberately doesn't
  support this old algorithm, and the pure-Rust sha1 crate is painfully
  slow. OpenSSL might still be a better choice than ring/rustls for TLS
  but it's nice to have the option.

For the video sample entries, I decided we don't need to hash at all. I
think the id number is sufficiently stable, and it's okay---perhaps even
desirable---if an existing init segment changes for fixes like e5b83c2.
2020-03-20 21:46:53 -07:00
Scott Lamb
317a620e6e upgrade copyright notices
* As discussed in #48, say "The Moonfire NVR Authors" at the top of
  every file rather than whoever created that file. Have one AUTHORS
  file listing everyone.
* Consistently call it a "security camera network video recorder" rather
  than "security camera digital video recorder".
2020-03-01 22:53:41 -08:00
Scott Lamb
d61b5e1bdd Use fixed-size directory meta files
Add a new schema version 5; now 4 means the directory meta may or may
not be upgraded.

Fixes #65: now it's possible to open the directory even if it lies on a
completely full disk.
2019-07-04 23:30:37 -05:00
Scott Lamb
5bba71345c few small markdown tweaks 2018-08-24 21:04:13 -07:00
Scott Lamb
c5345c1e11 simplify and fix installation instructions
* install.md, install-manual.md, and easy-install.md had a lot of
  redundancy. Rework them so the common prefix and suffix are in
  install.md and it's clear when to navigate back and forth. This
  removes from very stale references to prep.sh and cameras.sql in
  install-manual.md (which never should have mentioned these scripts
  anyway).

* remove all the SAMPLE_MEDIA_DIR, SAMPLE_FILE_DIR, and
  SAMPLE_FILE_PATH stuff from the scripts. This was too complicated
  (one variable will suffice) and inconsistent in terminology (a
  couple "samples dir" occurrences slipped through review; they
  should have been "sample file dir"). It also wasn't really useful
  enough because the procedure for a mount point is manual anyway,
  and because some installs will have multiple sample file dirs
  anyway.

* in the mount point procedure, fix the paths to be consistent. Also
  describe the "nofail" and "Requires=" config I have on my machine.

* fix some incorrect info about how to use "moonfire-nvr config" and
  describe "flush_if_sec".
2018-08-24 20:45:46 -07:00
Scott Lamb
65e68d3255 update design docs for new-schema branch changes 2018-03-24 20:51:30 -07:00
Scott Lamb
88051a1188 adjust startup timings again
I forgot to drop the cache before grabbing the numbers earlier today.
2018-03-20 22:37:45 -07:00
Scott Lamb
bdf52d743b adjust some timings in schema.md
The new numbers are taken from my odroid setup. In particular, the size check
is noticeably slower than what I'd gathered before, enough to show that it
shouldn't be performed on startup.
2018-03-20 08:46:48 -07:00
Scott Lamb
04e9f3f160 support segmented mp4s
This is intended to support HTML5 Media Source Extensions, which I expect to
be the most practical way to make a good web UI with a proper scrub bar and
such.

This feature has had very limited testing on Chrome and Firefox, and that was
not entirely successful. More work is needed before it's usable, but this
seems like a helpful progress checkpoint.
2017-10-01 15:29:22 -07:00
Scott Lamb
86dd36d7a5 version the sqlite3 database schema
See guide/schema.md for instructions on upgrading past this commit.
2016-12-20 15:44:04 -08:00
Scott Lamb
3b0dc5368e Write using the shiny new schema
There's a lot of work left to do on this:

* important latency optimization: the recording threads block
  while fsync()ing sample files, which can take 250+ ms. This
  should be moved to a separate thread to happen asynchronously.

* write cycle optimizations: several SQLite commits per camera per minute.

* test coverage: this drops testing of the file rotation, and
  there are several error paths worth testing.

* ffmpeg oddities to investigate:

  * the out-of-order first frame's pts
  * measurable delay before returning packets
  * it sometimes returns an initial packet it calls a "key" frame that actually
    has an SEI recovery point NAL but not an IDR-coded slice NAL, even though
    in the input these always seem to come together. This makes playback
    starting from this recording not work at all on Chrome. The symptom is
    that it loads a player-looking thing with the proper dimensions but
    playback never actually starts.

  I imagine these are all related but haven't taken the time to dig through
  ffmpeg code and understand them. The right thing anyway may be to ditch
  ffmpeg for RTSP streaming (perhaps in favor of the live555 library), as
  it seems to have other omissions like making it hard/impossible to take
  advantage of Sender Reports. In the meantime, I attempted to mitigate
  problems by decreasing ffmpeg's probesize.

* handling overlapping recordings: right now if there's too much time drift or
  a time jump, you can end up with recordings that the UI won't play without
  manual database changes. It's not obvious what the right thing to do is.

* easy camera setup: currently you have to manually insert rows in the SQLite
  database and restart.

but I think it's best to get something in to iterate from.

This deletes a lot of code, including:

* the ffmpeg video sink code (instead now using a bit of extra code in Stream
  on top of the SampleFileWriter, SampleIndexEncoder, and MoonfireDatabase
  code that's been around for a while)

* FileManager (in favor of new code using the database)

* the old UI

* RealFile and friends

* the dependency on protocol buffers, which was used for the config file
  (though I'll likely have other reasons for using protocol buffers later)

* even some utilities like IsWord that were just for validating the config
2016-02-03 23:22:37 -08:00
Scott Lamb
60988f0646 Add sample index codec; fix schema doc. 2016-01-05 11:01:36 -08:00
Scott Lamb
cc0adc327b Rough draft of schema design doc. 2016-01-04 23:52:05 -08:00