How to do the search through older Xeoma’s recordings that are in .mp4?

Q: Is it possible to load old archived recordings in the MP4-format and run Motion have XEOMA detected motion? How?

A: First of all, a bit of history to make further advice clearer. Xeoma’s default way to store recordings is with the ‘Preview and Archive’ module. If a functioning ‘Motion Detector’ module is connected in the chain of modules before the ‘Preview and Archive’ module, recordings will be stored when there is a motion event detected, and the information about the timeline of those events will be stored _separately_ in a database file .db that is usually located near the recordings.

Initially Xeoma’s ‘Preview and Archive’ module had been saving recordings in two formats: .mjpg for MJPEG recordings, and .mp4 for recordings of H264 streams.
See more about the difference of formats here
Afterwards, those formats were changed from .mjpeg to .xem, and from .mp4 to .mkv

So, if your current Xeoma installation has both Xeoma’s older recordings in .mp4 and newer ones in .mkv, your Xeoma will play them back together with no issues. Information about the older motion events and the newer motion events will be stored in a unified .db file.

If what you have is .mp4 files that are
a) made outside of Xeoma,
b) made in Xeoma but not with the ‘Preview and Archive’ module (for example, with the ‘Save to File’ module, or exported from Xeoma archive viewer), or
c) made by Xeoma’s ‘Preview and Archive’ module, but you are sure you don’t have information about their motion events in your current Xeoma’s database (for example, you switched machines and only saved the recordings, without the database file),

then you’d need to feed the recordings to Xeoma as fake camera streams so that it engages its search-for-motion algorithms on those recordings. In other words, you’d need to emulate a camera stream from those recordings because Xeoma only applies its video analytics live (but afterwards, when Xeoma already has this ‘metadata’ (data about motions, for example) you can see the motion events in Xeoma’s archive viewer).

Here’s a guide on how to emulate video camera streams from videos

Valid as of September 6, 2023