Substreams

Substream is a lower resolution video used for reducing Macula Monitor PC resource usage (CPU, network) for live view display. For example, main stream for recording can be set to 1920x1080 at 30fps and substream - to 640x480 at 15fps, which would provide much lower load for Macula Monitor PC to display video stream. This allows to have high quality recordings combined with the ability to view many video streams on a low-performance Macula Monitor PC and with limited bandwidth.

Both streams are available for live view and for recording (the latter is configured via Macula Console). The live stream selection is configured to Auto by default, which means automatic switching between higher/lower resolution streams depending on the image size in order to save network and CPU resources. For instance, Macula Monitor may show a high-resolution stream if you view one camera at a time, but if you go to 4x4 view, Macula Monitor will automatically switch all the cameras to substreams, if they are available. In multi-channel views, the application compares each viewport size to resolutions of both channel streams and decides, which one is better, based on similarity to the output viewport size.

Macula Monitor application has the following visual indication for substreams in live view as a viewport overlay item (bottom right):

Automatic selection between high and low resolution

High quality picture

Low quality picture (substream)

When no substream is available, the viewport overlay indicator simply does not appear at all for the target channel.

Substreams must be activated on the camera via Web browser and, for some devices, also in the stream properties in Macula Console. Please verify camera performance to make sure substream can be handled by the camera along with the other features enabled on the camera: some devices tend to lower overall FPS with the second stream turned ON.

Most cameras provide second stream as first stream image scaled to fit low resolution; however, some devices crop the centre of a high-resolution image to fit the small frame, and thus the substream picture appears as if it were zoomed in. Keep this in mind when you are using substream for live view and especially for software-side motion detector analysis.

If both main stream and substream are configured for recording, the target channel will be expandable in playback mode and will have both streams available for playback.