We are using Milestone XProtect Corporate 2018 R1. The goal is to stress test our software which accepts streams from the VMS and process accordingly. The initial idea was to use the DirectShow Driver to spin up as many camera instances as needed, however I’m seeing in a different thread the following:
Note: In both Advanced VMS products and Professional VMS products, you cannot add more than one DirectShow driver on one Recording Server. Only one DirectShow driver can be added per one Recording Server.
With that being said I thought best to reach out and see what our options are. The least favorable option would be connecting physical cameras as video files are sufficient for what we are looking to accomplish. Since DirectShow only has 8 camera ports for us to feed a video file and only one recording server can be used for an instance of the DirectShow driver then I’m assuming the solution would be to have multiple recording servers each with it’s own DirectShow Driver instance.
I would prefer to do this on a single machine as we would also like to track some metrics from our VMS, but what are our options at this point? Additional recording servers accessible through networking I would imagine would be one solution. Any suggestions are welcomed.
Thank you for your time!
-Kenny
Milestone is right now working on a putting a better tool for emulating cameras on a Milestone XProtect VMS to the developer community. We expect to have something in the 2019R1 release. Right now I cannot tell you more on this.
There might be camera emulators out there, not from Milestone, but from camera vendors, capable of emulating larger number of cameras that are supported in Milestone.
The last option I can think of is using multiple MIP Driver based applications. The User Interface Video Provider sample could be modified so that multiple instances could be used. https://developer.milestonesys.com/s/article/Can-I-have-multiple-MIP-Driver-based-devices
Thanks Bo. I appreciate the suggestion and great news about the emulation feature and its timing. I will look into the suggestion in the meantime.
Hi
it’s possible to change number of DirectShow cameras (more than 8) and the second it’s possible to add more than one DS.
No, it is not possible add more than one DirectShow driver device which comes with 8 cameras.
For emulating larger number of cameras please explore the StableFPS driver which is included with the MIP SDK. This is the new option I mentioned!
Hi, yes StableFPS is better.
About DS I’ve got the next
I stand corrected! 
Thank you for the good news.
You’re welcome.
But you’re right about 8 channels per one DS hardware. Even for 12 channels per DS only 8 are working, but I’ve not dived deeper yet with it. I hope it could be fixed like adding another +1 DS hardware.
As result, for now, it’s possible to add more than one DS HW but only with 8 channels.
Awesome. Again thanks for the knowledge sharing.
