baldeagle wrote:Excaliber wrote:PeteCamp wrote:I think this is correct, but it could be in error. It is reported that the video surveillance system was one of the new top of the line systems by the same company that installs them in casinos. It uses a hard drive to record and they pulled the hard drive out and then could not read it because it was no longer attached to the main CPU and software. They sent it to an outfit in CA to see if they could find the video amongst all the directories on the hard drive.
This is the situation I described as a likely issue in an earlier post.
If they had simply left the drive in the system, they would have been able to retrieve the video - assuming, of course, that was their objective.
I would be shocked if the videos aren't in a standard format; mpeg, h261 or h263 or vc-1. I do hard drive forensics fairly routinely at UTD, and the forensics software makes it extremely simple to create a copy of any file and run it on a standard viewer. Obtaining the videos, even from a damaged hard drive, is certainly possible and in many cases easy to do. In addition, I'd be surprised if the supplier wouldn't provide the investigators with a copy of the software that accesses the videos. Modern software is smart enough to pass over bad hard drive sectors, so it's unlikely that any video would be corrupted. It's hard to imagine a circumstance, unless their system was very old, that would make the videos non-recoverable.
In short, if the videos turn out not to be available, I would be extremely suspicious.
Since the video surveillance system at
Costco was reportedly state of the art, I'm sure you're correct that the videos are in a standard format and are more than likely intact and therefore recoverable with or without the surveillance software
Costco uses.
The challenge will lie in finding the few minutes of recordings you're looking for from a small handful of cameras on a 2 terabyte drive that has stored simultaneous 24 hour recordings from dozens of cameras for a rolling 30 day time period. The volume of data on that drive will be huge. Without the database that indexes date, time, and camera with a recording's location on the multiple disks in the drive, it will require either a lot of painstaking review or some clever software to locate and copy the evidence in this case.
This
may be part of the reason for the delayed inquest. Then again, it may not.
That's the $64,000 question.
