Bonsai crashes after >40 min of VideoWriting

[margo-tje]

Hi all,
I have a small/simple Bonsai workflow with a VideoCapture Device node and a Video Write node with the goal of 30 fps (which the camera should support). I started with the Vision .avi video write node, and this worked well for videos of +- 30 min. However, I would like to record longer videos, up to 90 min. Unfortunately, Bonsai seems to crash when recording longer videos. It uses 93-96% of the memory when running, and after 40-50 min it crashes, without any error message. It slows down and then the complete pc shuts down/restarts.

I searched for similar issues and found that the Vision VideoWriter node can sometimes give issues. Therefore, I changed to the ffmpeg node, but this have not seemed to have solved the issue. Again, after 40-50 of recording, the pc restarts without displaying any error message. If I run the same workflow with the videowrite node disabled, it runs fine, confirming my suspicion that that is the issue. I am wondering

As I do not receive any error message, I am completely unsure in what direction I need to look for a solution. Could it be a hardware issue, a memory and/or RAM issue? A Bonsai or ffmpeg issue? I would appeciate some trouble shooting suggestions.

Thanks!

[banchan86]

Hey @margo-tje! Your situation sounds similar to this one here https://groups.google.com/g/bonsai-users/c/paohivu_rQE/m/4lQA4zywAgAJ, it seems like your video writing cannot keep up with the data being streamed. Using the ffmpeg version would only help if you had a GPU that could handle hardware encoding and you need to specifically enable some ffmpeg parameters for that, something like -c:v h264_nvenc. There are some debugging tips in that thread you could try out.

[bruno-f-cruz]

This is likely a memory accumulation problem as @banchan86 suggested. However, I wouldn't assume it's related to the encoding strategy. Looking at the workflow that Zip seems rather problematic to me. What is it you are trying to do? Consider that if the Zip input from the SerialRead "lags" in relationship to the video events, unmatched frames will queue at the operator and progressively grow in memory.

[margo-tje]

Thank you both for the quick response.

So the goal is to save the video and a .csv file with the video frame numbers and their respective timings for post-recording synchronisation of different data streams. To aid that, the serial input is a Sync pulse from an Arduino, that is send to all hardware. I will try to split the video frames collection and the serial input, as indeed they will be a different sampling rates (thus lag). Will report back!