Vitamin D Video Reference Guide

Monitor View

The Monitor view is where you see what is on your cameras, and manage what is recorded at what times.

See a short video tutorial of this topic here.

monitor view

The Basics

Once you have set up your camera, you can see a live view of what the camera is recording in the main camera pane (3). If you have not yet set up your camera, see the Getting started tab.
IMPORTANT: your computer must be on to record videos. Recording will continue in the background if you quit the Vitamin D Video application, but will be stopped if your computer sleeps or shuts down. Make sure your computer is not set to go to sleep after periods of inactivity. Instructions how to disable automated sleep settings on your computer are here.
To switch your camera between off and on, click the green power icon (4).
- If your camera is on but disconnected from your PC, Vitamin D Video will attempt to reconnect periodically. If you want to attempt to reconnect manually, right-click the main camera pane and select Reconnect.
Below the main camera pane is a list of "rules" (5). A rule is a filter for video clips based on a set of criteria that you select.
- The default rule is to record and save any object seen anywhere, at any time, but more specific criteria can be set using the Rule editor. For example, you can record any object that crosses a line, or people coming through a door.
- Click a rule to see options to edit, delete or add a new rule.
- To see a list of video clips that meet the criteria of that rule in the Search view, click the magnifying glass icon next to the rule.
Icons to right of the rule (7) indicate if an action is set up in response to seeing the rule triggered.
- An envelope appears if you have set a notification response for the rule (e.g., send me an email if a person enters the stock room).
- A Save icon appears if you have set up the rule to save a clip when the rule is triggered. These clips will be kept as long as disk there is enough disk space is available. Once a maximum amount of disk space is used, the oldest clips are deleted. You can, however, export any video clip to save it permanently, as described in the Search view section. Also, all video is temporarily saved (up to about 48 hours, depending on available disk space). For details on how video files are managed, see the Managing your video section.
- To temporarily disable a rule (e.g., stop emails from being sent), uncheck the box on the right.
- If no icons or rule schedule times (6) appear, that means no response has been set up for that rule (e.g., save the video or notify me if an event is seen) . This type of rule is used for finding or filtering video clips in the Search view. To set a response, click the text of the rule and select Edit Rule....
To add a camera, select Add Camera... from the Tools menu. Detailed instructions for adding cameras can be found in the Getting started tab.
Basic and Pro Editions only. If you have multiple cameras set up, they are displayed in smaller video panes on the right (8).
- Click on a small window to display it in the main camera pane. The circle next to the name of the camera indicates the power state of the camera. Click the circle to switch between off and on/standby.
- To add, remove or edit camera settings, right-click the camera pane to see a menu of options.
- If you have multiple cameras, if you make the window wider (by clicking and dragging the bottom right corner), you can re-arrange the smaller video panes from a vertical to a horizontal format:

Details and advanced features

Scheduling rules
- You may wish to limit the time that rules are processed. For example, you may only wish to be notified by email when your office is closed, or you may not want to not bother recording at night when a scene is too dark. To select the date and time to process rules, click the rule schedule text (6) to see this window :

Note that the rule schedule text does not appear if you have not set up the rule to record or take other action when an event is seen (these are called "responses"). You can still see the rule and use it to search recorded video clips, but it will not trigger any action, and therefore cannot be scheduled. If a rule has no responses set up, click the text of the rule and select Edit Rule... to display the Rule Editor.

Arming and turning off multiple cameras (Basic and Pro editions only)
- If you have multiple cameras set up, you can turn them on all at once by clicking the Arm Cameras button (2).

Select the check boxes of the cameras you wish to be running after you click OK.
- In the above example, only the three selected cameras will be turned on.
- Any camera that is not selected in this list will be turned off if it is running. In the above example, let's say you manually turned on all cameras by clicking the On buttons in the Monitor view. If you then click Arm Cameras, the three selected cameras would remain running, and the other cameras would be turned off.
You can set a delay for the cameras before they are armed. For example, you might be inside a building and want time to get out before the cameras begin recording and/or sending notification alerts. Select Delay before turning on cameras, and choose an amount of time (e.g., 1 minute). Then if you click Arm cameras, you will see a dialog with a countdown telling you when the cameras will be turned on:

To turn off all cameras with one step (instead of turning off each camera individually), click Turn Off Cameras.

To run Vitamin D Video automatically when you boot:

In Windows, place a copy of the program icon in Start\Programs\Startup.
On Mac OS, go to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items, click the + button to select Vitamin D Video.

Changing camera settings

Once you have a camera working, you can edit the camera settings by right-clicking the camera pane in the Monitor view and selecting Edit camera.... If you wish to modify the settings of the camera whose view is displayed in the main camera pane, you can also select Edit camera... from the Tools menu.

edit camera settings

If you have changed the user name or password that you use to access your camera, you need to update those settings in this screen for Vitamin D Video to continue talking to the camera.
In the Basic and Pro Editions, you can also change the resolution that Vitamin D Video uses to save the video files. By default (and in the Starter Edition), all video is reduced to 320 x 240 (QVGA), regardless of what resolution is being streamed from the camera. If your camera is streaming 640 x 480 (VGA) and you want to view and save higher-resolution video on Vitamin D Video, you can change the resolution here. If the video does not appear to be recording at the resolution you expect, here are a few important points:
- Selecting higher resolution settings can increase processing and disk space requirements considerably. For resolutions higher than VGA, you may find it necessary to increase the amount of disk space allocated to saving video, which is described in the section Managing Your Video.
- On Windows, aspect ratios of higher resolutions are preserved. For example, the main video panes in the Monitor view and Search View are displayed in a 4:3 aspect ratio. If the video from your camera is not at a 4:3 ratio, black bars will be displayed at the edges of the video. On Mac OS, your video image may be stretched to fit the video pane.
- When analyzing video for recognition processing, Vitamin D Video first scales the video to 320 x 240 (QVGA), regardless of the resolution coming in from your camera. In other words, setting your camera to a higher resolution will not change recognition accuracy.

Click here for advanced setup options

If you select Other IP camera instead of your camera model, you can enter a custom URL to access the video stream of your camera.

Network cameras often have multiple URL strings which allows them to access different types of video streams. For example, a given camera might support streaming video using MJPEG compression and MPEG4 compression. As a result, the IP address is the same, but a different text string in the URL will allow you to access a different
The URL consists of the IP address and a custom string of text. For cameras in the camera type list, this string is appended for you (and therefore not shown). For example, if you select the D-Link 920 and enter the IP address 10.0.1.10, the actual URL used is http://10.0.1.10/video.cgi. In addition, if the device appears in the list on the previous screen, that means the IP address is known, so you don't have to enter it. (It is displayed for your convenience, however.)
To find this string, you can enter the camera model's name, "url" and "mjpeg" or "mpeg4" in a search engine.
Advanced tip: MPEG4 generally takes less bandwidth than MJPEG, but the MPEG4 streams for certain cameras have been found to generate video playback issues. This is because MPEG4 keeps one out of every several frames and programmatically fills in the frames in between. MJPEG, on the other hand, keeps and compresses every frame, which is less efficient but sometimes more reliable than MPEG4.

advanced settings

Changing your camera location name

To change the name of your camera location, select Tools > Edit Camera Location... (also available when you right-click on a camera).

edit camera location

You are presented with two options:

Edit the location name. Select this if you want to change the camera location name, and are not moving the camera. Remember that camera names are used in the filter video clips in the Search view and to create rules. If you change the camera name and click OK, the old camera name will be replaced by the new camera name in the filter list of the Search view and the camera selected in the Rule Editor. Also, existing rules will be updated to use the new camera name.
Create a new location because I moved my camera. If you are moving the camera, however, it is helpful to rename the camera location so you can keep the old camera name for searching videos recorded at that location. Also, existing rules will remain associated with the previous location name.
- For example, let's say you moved a camera from the lobby to the parking lot. Enter the time you moved it, such as today at 8am. If you go to the Search view any video recorded on that camera before 8am today will appear when you click "Lobby," and any video you recorded after 8am today will appear when you click "Parking lot."
- You can also make these changes after the fact. Let's say that you moved the camera to the parking lot and didn't change any settings. If you went to the Search view the next day and clicked Parking lot, you would see numerous videos of people in your lobby. It would be even more confusing if you created a rule to search for people crossing a line in the parking lot, and it showed you numerous clips of people crossing the equivalent line in the lobby! Fortunately at that point you could edit the camera name and "back date" the time you moved the camera (in this example that would be the previous day). Then your clips would be separated into those recorded in the lobby and those in the parking lot.

Removing a camera

If you are no longer using a camera, you can right-click the camera pane in the Monitor view and selecting Remove camera.... If you wish to remove the settings of the camera whose view is displayed in the main camera pane, you can also select Remove camera... from the Tools menu. You will see this dialog:

remove camera confirmation

If you select the checkbox, all of the video recorded with that camera will be deleted. If you do not check the box, the videos will remain, and you will continue to be able to search for videos recorded by that camera. The camera will appear in the Search view listed as an "inactive" camera. If you continue to record video on your other camera(s), however, eventually your disk space will fill up and the video will be deleted.