Surveillance Systems & The Daylight Savings Disaster?

Brian Rhodes

•Feb 21, 2014

IPVMU Certified

Time and date accuracy for many video systems is notoriously bad, a circumstance we address in this post.

However (or maybe because of this), I have never really considered the impact that US Daylight Saving Time has on a system until this caught my eye:

Specifically these points:

Dual Recordings
No Recordings
Inability to retrieve live/recorded video from clients

seem a bit strong for a) an event that only shifts time one hour, and b) has been a design constraint for computers since the very beginning.

It got me wondering: How big of an issue is DST for your video systems? Are we talking a common problem here? What steps do you take to accommodate for the time change on your video systems?

Ari Erenthal

•Feb 21, 2014

Chesapeake & Midlantic

When I was a kid, we had to go around to all our customers and pull the chips out of their burglar alarms and burn new PROM chips and install them when they went from a 7 digit to a 10 digit phone number system. Then a couple years later we had to do it all over again because of the DST changeover. And that's only one reason for my intense, burning hatred for Daylight Savings Time. At least I learned hexidecimal.

Mark Lewis

•Feb 21, 2014

This is the *easier* time change when we jump forward. The worse one is fall when we jump back ( potentially interleaving or overwriting data ) ;) All video management should be GMT/UTC based, no time shifting. Keep the timezones at the UI.

Carl Lindgren

•Feb 22, 2014

Properly designed VMS's have no trouble accomodating the shifts from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time and back. Our original Honeywell Enterprise system had problems early on (2003-2005) but they were resolved by 2006. If a manufacturer can't get that right, they have no business selling systems in the U.S. unless they choose to restrict their sales to Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), Hawaii (to IPVM's advantage) and a few territories.

Brian Rhodes

•Mar 09, 2014

IPVMU Certified

Bumping this out of curiosity. Anyone have issues today? What were they?