Installing on recording server

In Management Client, you must add a screen recorder device that connects to the XProtect Screen Recorder service. It is added and configured like any other IP video camera. For more information, see the section about how to add hardware in the administrator manual for XProtect VMS.

When you add a screen recorder device, the user name must be videoos and the device type Screen Recorder. A screen recorder device has the following configurable parameters:

  • Frames per second/live frame rate
  • Quality
  • Capture mode

When adding a screen recorder device, you must provide the IP address of the device. In this case, the device is a computer. But when adding a device of the Screen Recorder type, you may be in a situation where the computer does not have a permanent IP address. In that case, you can use the Domain Name System (DNS) name of the computer.

Set frames per second/live frame rate

Frames per second in XProtect Corporate / Live frame rate in other Milestone surveillance products.

A low frame rate is recommended because high frame rates may cause heavy CPU usage on the computer with XProtect Screen Recorder installed. For this reason, the XProtect Screen Recorder feature never yields more than 4 frames per second.

Two frames per second offers a nice impression of screen activity and causes approximately 5-8% extra CPU usage on an average Windows 7 computer anno 2010. Thus, 2 or 3 frames per second is the recommended daily setting.

Set quality

Video frames are sent to the recording server as a series of JPEGs. It is possible to lower network and storage consumption by configuring a lower quality. However, this will result in a more blurred image. The effective valid range is 0 (poorest quality) to 100 (best quality). Default is 75, which reduces the amount of data nicely without reducing the visual quality too much. However, the JPEG algorithm is not optimized for computer images with many rectangles. So even with a high quality you will still observe glitches around straight lines.

Set capture mode

With regards to capture mode, there is a choice of:

  • Primary screen only: the primary screen only
  • All screens (if there is more than one screen): a mosaic of all screens setup for the computer in question
  • Screen 1, Screen 2, etc. (if there is more than one screen): The selected screen only