Tried to Destroy a Blue Iris Clip Protected or in Use
Working with Clips
The term Clip in Blue Iris is used to refer to a movie file. The clip list however may also contain still images (JPEGs). Clips are created by automated camera recording options, or by using the manual snapshot or manual record toolbar icons .
Here's a Blue Iris screenshot showing both the Clip List and the Clip Viewer:
Notice that when the Viewer window is open, the live camera window is moved to the lower-right hand corner. If you have more than one camera, you may cycle through them by double-clicking on the "Cameras" window title bar. If you click on the live video image, the viewer will be closed.
The Clip List
The clip list is located to the right of the Cameras window:
As alerts and clips are created, "thumbnail" images are created on the clip list. The clip list has a vertical scroll bar, and zoom in/out buttons. When you zoom out, more clips and their associated thumbnails will fit into the clip list window before it becomes necessary to use the scroll bar. However, a number of graphical clip features are only visible in the fully "zoomed-in" view.
To the right of the thumbnail image, you will find the camera name and time of capture. Beneath that is the duration and file size. A green bar is displayed to graphically show the clip's size relative to others in the folder. This allows you to see at a glance which clips are longest or occupying the greatest amount of disk space. Finally, there are several icons that may possibly be displayed: Protected, Audio, Archive, and Flagged. If the clip is marked as Protected, it will not be moved automatically, deleted or recycled according to the automatic clean-up rules (discussed below). If the clip has the Audio icon, it has an audio track. If the clip has the Archive icon, it will be copied to your web archive according to settings on the Options/Clips/Backup page.
Click on a clip's thumbnail to "select" the clip. Once you've done this, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move up and down in the list. Now, press Enter, or double-click a clip to "open" the clip for viewing. More than one clip may be selected at a time by holding down the Ctrl key as you click on different clips. If you click on one clip, then click on another while holding the Shift key, all of the clips in-between the two will be selected.
Clip Folders
There are three main folders created for you:
Alerts
Represented by the red hazard icon. This folder contains snapshot images taken when cameras are active and triggered. Each alert snapshot acts as a bookmark into a video clip. If you open an alert snapshot, the clip that contains the alert event is opened in the viewer window. If the referenced clip is no longer available on your system, the alert JPEG itself is displayed if saved to disc. If the alert image exists only in the database, nothing will open in the viewer window.
New + Stored
Click the green "play" icon to see all video clips stored on your system. Each clip may represent many trigger events or a continuous recording, as configured on the Record tab in camera properties. Clips may be divided into many drives and subfolders. The folder drop-down list allows you to navigate these folders.
Flagged
Represented by the blue flag icon. Any clip or alert image may ALSO exsit on this view. You may add or remove items from the Flagged view by right-clicking and selecting the option from the pop-up menu.
You may also create any number of subfolders to allow you to organize your clips. After you select a folder such as New or Stored, right-click in the Clip List and select "Goto folder..." to see the folder tree:
Click the Make New Folder button to place a new folder at the highlighted position. When this folder tree is changed, the list of folders will be updated at the top of the Clip List. You may view any subfolder by selecting it from the drop-down list. The ".." entry in the list moves you "up" or "backwards" in the folder tree. To move clips between folders, select one or more clips, then right-click on the Clip List and select "Move to another folder..."
While viewing the New folder (or one of its subfolders), right-click on a clip and select Move to move it to another managed folder or to export it to another location. If a clip is in a subfolder, that subfolder is automatically created within the target managed folder. That is, when you Move a clip from New\Home to the Stored folder, the subfolder Stored\Home is created if it does not yet exist.
Please note that Blue Iris DVR (.bvr) files are only readable by Blue Iris. Before you export a video, you may wish to Edit it (described above) to both shorten it to the section of interest and convert it to an interchangeable format (WMV or MP4).
You may have a camera automatically place its new clips directly into a subfolder by adding the subfolder name(s) to the beginning of the filename on the camera's Record Properties page. For example, Home\&CAM.%Y%m%d_%H%M%S will place new clips into the New\Home folder. Use &CAM\&CAM.%Y%m%d_%H%M%S to create a folder for each camera.
IMPORTANT: you must retain the code following any added subdirectories. This code consists of the camera name followed by a period and the date. The camera name here is used throughout the software to identify clips belonging to a particular camera.
Sorting the Clip List
Use the cross-arrows icon to alternate between ascending and descending date order. Use the camera icon located to the left of the arrow icon to toggle the camera filter on or off. When this filter is on, only clips from the selected camera are displayed in the clip list.
The Clip List Calendar
Use the calendar icon to bring up the clip list calendar view.
The clip list will be filtered by the date that you select. Red dots denote days with activity. The most recently selected date is shown in blue, and today's date is shown with red numbering. Use the Cancel button to remove the date filter from the clip list.
The Clip Viewer
The clip viewer allows you to play the clip, if it is a movie, either frame by frame, or full-speed. There is a slider which represents the current frame position within the video. If the movie has sound, you can also adjust the playback volume with a volume slider.
Use the buttons on either side of the play button to step frame-by-frame forward or backward. Holding down either of these buttons will automatically repeat the stepping.
The play button may be clicked multiple times to advance from normal speed to 2x, 4x, on up to 256x. For BVR files, the reverse play button is also available.
The buttons at the far-left and far-right are used to advance to the next or previous event in a BVR file. A maximum of 30 seconds at a time will be skipped. This is particularly handy if your recorded clips contain multiple events or a continuous recording. For all file types, once there is no further event to display, the next or previous file on the clip list is then opened.
Use the mouse wheel over the viewer window to digitally zoom in and out. When you are zoomed-in, you may use the left mouse button to "drag" the video within the window.
To close the Clip Viewer and return to the live camera view, click on the live camera view or the X icon at the top-right of the viewer window.
The Timeline View
This is the view at the bottom of the main window beneath either the cameras or viewer window:
The purpose of this view is to graphically represent the contents of you clip list as a function of time. Using the slider you will find 12 levels of zoom that allow for viewing an hour of time or several days at once. Clips are grouped into colored rectangles in one or more tracks. Each color used by a camera will be given its own track. Alerts and Flagged clips will be illustrated with appropriate icons. The "focus time" is shown with a red line.
There are many ways to navigate the timeline. You can click and drag the date/time portion of the display. You may click within the track area to move the focus time (the red line). You may drag within this area as well and cause it to scroll at the sides. When you change the focus time, the clips list should also automatically scroll to the appropriate time as well.
Use the clock icon to jump to the current time. When you do this, the timeline enters "now" mode and will automatically advance with real time.
Use the calendar icon to jump to a specific date in time.
Timeline Playback
Enter time-based playback mode by double clicking anywhere on the timeline. In this mode, the Cameras window becomes a playback window, and each individual camera window will show the appropriate BVR file for the selected focus time. As you navigate the timeline or use the play controls, each camera window will be updated accordingly allowing for synchronized playback control.
You may select to listen to the audio for a particular video by clicking on its window. Double-click a video window to open one individual clip in the standard viewer mode. Use the Esc key to return to the timeline playback mode. Use the Esc key again, the clock icon, allow playback to reach the current time in order to exit the timeline playback mode.
Deleting Clips
When you right-click on a clip and select the Delete menu item, you then have a choice of either Recycle or Destroy. When you choose to recycle, clips are moved to the Windows recycle bin. When you choose to destroy, they are permanently deleted. When you delete a clip, its associated Alert images are also automatically deleted for you.
Editing Clips
The clip viewer allows you to edit clips by moving the two markers you see below the position slider--there's a green or "start" point and a red or "stop" point. When you click Play, playback loops from the start point to the stop point.
To make your edit permanent, click the Trim/Export button that's to the right of the black box or right-click the viewer window and click Trim/Export to remove the video that's both before the start point and after the stop point. You may choose to replace the current video or to create a new one. If you choose to replace, the video is automatically re-opened in the viewer; otherwise, you will see a new clip created in the clip list.
BVR and AVI are considered "input" formats, while MP4 and WMV are considered "output" formats. You may convert an input format to an output format. In addition, you may trim an AVI file to an output AVI file, or convert a BVR file to an AVI file, without re-encoding the video or audio streams. Note that if the output format is AVI, the final file size must be less than 1GB. The new clip will retain the original's "date modified" and file attributes (such as read-only or protected status).
If you are using direct-to-disc recording (no video re-encoding video from the camera) then you will notice that text and graphic overlays such as the time stamp that may be specified on the Video tab in camera properties are not added to your recordings. You may choose to add these now during the export. The precise video timestamp is retained in the BVR format and is used here to reproduce the exact time overlay that would otherwise have been recorded.
Clips and Archiving Options
The Clip Options window allows you to specify the physical location on your hard drive where clips will be created and stored. You must specify the first three, with default names New, Stored and Alerts. You may specify up to 10 in total. These folders must not be overlapping or "inside" one another. You must retain a name for each folder, but if you will not be using it, you can blank out the path setting.
The Alerts folder is special in that it will contain JPEGs as configured by the option on the Record tab in camera properties and is not used for video recording. The Alerts folder must remain 3rd on the list.
These folders do not need to be located on the same hard drive or PC as the database. Note however, that if you are running Blue Iris as a service, you may not be able to use the "LocalSystem" account if your Stored clips folder is located on a network drive; instead, you must use a named user account, and give that account rights to the network resource.
Blue Iris may be configured to automatically move or delete clips based on age and disk space specifications. Each folder is handled completely independently. Each has its own age and disk space quota. The task which actually move files runs once each 5 minutes. In addition to the quotas you specify, Blue Iris also attempts to automatically enforce a rule of maintaining at least 1GB free on the hard drive in order to prevent failed recordings.
The size specified with "limit folder size" should fit comfortably on your hard drive. If you are short on space for it, you will see red warning text at the bottom of the window as well as status/messages log entries with double exclamation points !!. You should not allow your drive to fill up as this may cause video and/or database corruption.
By default, Blue Iris does NOT use the Windows Recycle Bin when deleting clips. It has been found that doing so greatly adversely affects performance when many clips are being deleted and the recycle bin itself is at capacity. However, the advantage of the recycle bin is that you may easily recover recently deleted files.
A clip may be protected from automatic storage or deletion by right-clicking it and selecting Protect. You may make this the default for all new clips by selecting an option on the camera's Record Properties page. To protect an entire folder, right-click in the Clip List and select the option Protect entire folder.
The Clip Database
New at version 3.33, this feature will offer huge savings in CPU and memory utilization, and the possibility for the management of 100,000's of clips now exists. The database will be created by default at C:\BlueIris\db. This location may be altered on the Options/Clips page but should be set for your fastest local storage or SSD if available. You may repair or regenerate the db at anytime by right-clicking in the clip view and selecting Database->Repair/Regenerate. The Database->Compact action removes deleted records and resets the recording status if the system was shutdown unexpectedly. The Compact action may be ran automatically once per day according to a setting on the Options/Clips page. When Compact or Repair/Regenerate is running, database updates must be suspended, so all camera recordings will be closed. If you have 24 hr mission critical recording, you can disable this automatic Compact and perform it manually at your convenience, however the database will continue to grow with deleted records during that time.
Clip Backup
Select Use FTP to backup clips to the Internet to enable Web archival of your clips. Select an FTP server that you preconfigured on the Options/FTP servers page. Leave the Folder box empty to simply use the default folder specified on the FTP server configuration page.
To manually select to archive a clip to the Web, right-click it and select Archive. An FTP icon will be displayed on the clip in the clip list until it has been successfully uploaded. If Blue Iris is interrupted during a file transfer, a partial file may exist on your server until Blue Iris is restarted and retries the transfer. Until a clip is actually sent, you may right-click it and select Don't archive.
Clips may be marked automatically for archival via an option on a camera's Record Properties page.
Source: https://www.houselogix.com/docs/blue-iris/BlueIris/Clips.htm