Unreliable recordings

[Britincali]

Hi
I've been using Blue Iris 4.0 for about 18months. I have 7 cameras connected via a mix of WiFi and wired to a dedicated i5 PC. None of the cameras are fancy, a selection of Amcrest and FDT, and a Raspberry PI IR too. Some are pan/tilt, some fixed. All use RTSP I think.

Over the last couple of years I've had a few occasions to check them and every single time the thing I've been looking for was not recorded. This is across multple cameras, not just limited to one.

I have tried lots of setups for the TRIGGER and RECORD option tabs, but I either get things not recorded at all, or I get dozens of tiny few-second files, or I get stuff being cut off short.
If I ever have to rely upon them for something serious - I don't trust the setup to catch it.

For TRIGGER I just have motion-sensor checked, with the smallest trigger.
For RECORD options I've tried lots of combos.
I've got a single dumb profile that is on 24hrs a day. Nothing clever.

Can anyone advise the most basic "this will catch anything" setup?

Thanks for reading.

[HeneryH]

I run my cameras set to record always then use the alerts as markets of interest in the stream to help me out later. I wanted to make sure I always had the video even if the motion detect had a problem. As long as you have decent disk space that can hold a weeks worth of video or so you'll have plenty of time to go check.

If this is not an option, you can try using zone crossing as a technique to make motion detection better. You set zones in your frame then say that an event is when an object crosses from one zone to another. I've had better luck with this technique.

[clans2019]

Same as above. I had varying results with motion activated recording. It works fairly well with uniform lighting and close camera angles. Outdoor was more of an issue. I moved to simply recording continuously. Turned off any compression or conversion possible. This also gave me better performance since BI wasn't tracking motion all the time.

[darant1979]

When I have constant recording, my alerts seem not to work and I do not see event flags... I've go back to record on trigger...

[HeneryH]

When I have constant recording, my alerts seem not to work and I do not see event flags... I've go back to record on trigger...

You need to separate out the concepts of recording and alerting. Alerts are alerts and can be totally separate from recording. Whether you record always or record on alerts will have no impact on the quality of the alerts.

You seem to be indicating that your alert quality depends on whether you record on alerts or record always which should NOT be the case.