Overview
To help minimize missed recordings of important events, Secondary Stream provides continuous background video coverage by recording the camera’s lower‑resolution secondary stream 24/7 from gateway‑connected devices.
Note: Currently Secondary Stream Recording can only be enabled on gateway-connected devices.
Note: Enabling the Secondary Stream Recording will increase network bandwidth and storage usage (either on your gateway or in the cloud).
Note: Currently, the secondary stream does not include audio.
What’s Included
24/7 Low-Resolution Video Recording
A continuous, low-resolution stream (secondary stream) runs in the background.
Helps ensure that no events are completely missed, even if motion detection fails or is misconfigured.
Useful as a fallback for investigating critical incidents (e.g., break-ins, safety violations).
How to Enable the Secondary Stream Recording Functionality
Note: As part of this limited release, enabling Secondary Stream Recording requires a gateway restart, resulting in a brief outage (about 5 minutes). Recordings will be interrupted during this time, and health notifications may be sent if enabled. All other operations remain unaffected.
Contact the Arcules Support team (support@arcules.com) to request that Secondary Stream recording be made available for your organization.
Once available for your organization, access the Arcules web portal.
On the left menu, select Devices. Then click on the All Devices menu.
A list of devices will be displayed on the right side. Select the desired device.
On the right panel (also known as Device Drawer) you will see the device details. On the top right side, select the Settings options.
Select the Basic Settings option
Then enabled the Secondary stream recording option.
After it has been enabled, additional options for the secondary stream resolution and frame rate selection will be available through the Preset combo box.
Note: With this release introducing preset resolution options, existing customers may see a “Custom (current)” option that retains their previous setting. Once a preset is selected and saved, the Custom (current) option disappears.
Click the SAVE button.
Apply these steps to all gateway-connected devices you would like to activate this feature on.
How to Watch the Secondary Stream
When the Secondary stream option has been enabled, you can watch the secondary stream recording through the video player playback option.
Access the Arcules web portal.
On the left menu, select Devices. Then click on the All Devices menu.
A list of devices will be displayed on the right side. Select the desired device for which you wish to watch the secondary stream.
On the right panel (also known as Device Drawer) you will see the device details. Position your mouse over the video player. This will display a set of options. On the lower-left part you will see the playback icon. Click on it.
Select the three vertical dots
The following menu will be displayed:
The Resolution section includes the following options:
Auto: The video player blue motion line will display the High resolution by default, but if there is any gap in motion detection, the Low resolution will automatically be displayed to cover the gap.
High: Only the high resolution stream will be displayed in the video player.
Low: Only the low resolution stream will be displayed in the video player.
Secondary Stream Video Recording Retention Time
For storage, retention times for the Primary and Secondary streams are now managed separately, allowing you to configure each one independently. These settings are available in the Storage section under Storage Settings for the selected camera.
Note: Separate storage retention times apply only to gateways operating in Pure Cloud mode.
What’s Next
We’re gathering feedback during this limited release. Your input will help us:
Fine-tune the secondary stream experience.
Expand support to additional devices.
If you have any questions, comments or feedback, don't hesitate to reach out to us at pm@arcules.com or drop a message in the intercom chat 