Recording and clips on the Hub
How continuous recording works, what a clip is, and why a saved moment does not cost you a second recording.
How recording works
The Hub writes each camera to its own disk in segments, and keeps an index of what it has. Nothing is transcoded on the way in: what the camera sent is what lands on the disk, which is why recording sixteen cameras barely registers on the processor.
Recording is per camera, so you can record the gate and not the living room. Each camera can record its substream, which is small, or its main stream where you want the detail.
What a clip is
A clip is a span of footage the Hub already has, cut out and kept. Saving one does not start a new recording and does not re-encode anything it does not have to, so a clip of something that happened five minutes ago is available immediately.
Clips carry the camera's sound where the camera sent any. The Hub shows a wave over the picture while sound is actually playing, so a silent clip is distinguishable from a turned-down one.
When there is no footage
A hole in the timeline is labelled rather than left blank, because a gap you cannot explain is what makes people stop trusting a recorder.
- The camera was not answering, which is by far the most common one.
- Recording was switched off for that camera.
- The disk stopped taking writes, or filled up.
- The Hub itself was down.
- The disk is the one the Hub boots from, which it refuses to record onto.
The Hub will not record onto the card or disk it boots from. Continuous writing wears it out, and the thing you would lose is the footage. Point it at another disk under Storage.