Introduction

While not officially supported by Milestone, it is possible to setup a single physical PTZ to have multiple Recording Servers. The advantage of this configuration over the supported failover configuration is that each Recording Server has a full copy of the video from the PTZ and any bookmarks created by Witness up to the point at which one of the Recording Servers fails. From that point on, all remaining recording servers will continue to have a full copy of the video.

With this setup, if the Generate Bookmark option is checked in the plug-in, then Witness will create a bookmark on each “camera”. If the Generate Alarm option is checked in the plug-in, then Witness will create a single alarm which is logged against the first “camera” listed in the Milestone Plug-In configuration: Multi-Recording Servers for a single PTZ | Milestone Plug In.

Contents

Milestone Setup

The following images show the setup in Milestone of a single PTZ (360 Vision Predator) on two recording servers, RPU-TEST-MILESTONE and NAVTECH-TS2. Within Milestone this single physical PTZ appears as two separate cameras:

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Recording Server RPU-TEST-MILESTONE

Camera name is 1-PREDATOR x40 + IR Lights:

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Recording Server NAVTECH-TS2

Camera name is 2-PREDATOR x40 + IR Lights:

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Permissions

The Witness user has the permissions needed to see each camera and perform the required bookmark actions:

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Witness Setup

Camera Controller

Within the Witness Camera Controller configuration, the single PTZ is setup and configured as per normal (Adding Cameras).

Milestone Plug-In

Within the Witness Milestone plug-in configuration, a camera mapping entry is created for each of the “separate” Milestone cameras.

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Alarms

The creation of Alarms is managed by the Milestone Event Server. In this example configuration the source named in Milestone for any alarm involving the AdvanceGuard camera Predator x40 HD + IR Lights will be 1-PREDATOR x40 + IR Lights.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks will be created created against both of the Milestone “cameras”.

Finding the video recording associate with the alarm

As previously mention, the alarm generation is managed by the Event Server, not the Recording Server(s). In the event that one of the Recording Servers unavailable, the alarm still gets created with the source being the name of the first camera in the mapping. When this occurs, either at the time the alarm was logged or at the time the alarm is being investigated, the Alarm Manager view in the Xprotect Smart Client will be similar to the image below:

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When this occurs, the second copy of the recording can be found by searching for the bookmark containing the AdvanceGuard alarm id (4838 in this example):

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Related Information