Blue Iris UI3

[bp2008]

Anyone else seeing the UI3 popup alert: "Detected HTML5 video player stall. Reopening video stream." far more often in the last couple of months, when it was never previously present at all (in my case)? I don't recall exactly when this changed, but it was fairy recently.

This happens on a mobile phone browser (Brave generally, have also tested under Chrome, same results), and it makes no difference if I am on directly my own local LAN, or connecting remotely over an OpenVPN connection.

For the life of me I can't see what changed on my setup, CPU usage is always low (generally in the 4-10% range, with very occasional spikes up into the 20-25% range), FPS over UI3 stays at a consistent 5-6 FPS. I have played with resetting all the UI3 settings back to defaults, and switching the UI3 specific "HTML Video Delay Compensation" setting to all of the available options (with no significant change observed, maybe very slightly better with this setting set to “Strong”).

Anything else I should be looking at?

I've also been seeing it fairly often on mobile Chrome. This error message is entirely an invention of UI3 because at some point in the past I was having problems with the video player just freezing even though UI3 was still receiving new video frames from Blue Iris. I may need to tweak the detection code to make it wait a second or two longer for the video player to un-freeze before UI3 decides to restart it.

 

[CrazyAsYou]

I've also been seeing it fairly often on mobile Chrome. This error message is entirely an invention of UI3 because at some point in the past I was having problems with the video player just freezing even though UI3 was still receiving new video frames from Blue Iris. I may need to tweak the detection code to make it wait a second or two longer for the video player to un-freeze before UI3 decides to restart it.

The simple and best solution is to not use Chrome/Edge/Safari etc and stick with a good browser like Firefox

 

[TheWaterbug]

Nope. It's back this morning

"It" being the dreaded "video stream was lost" warning from UI3 Timeline view, that resolves automatically, but takes ~10 seconds to do so:

View attachment 194755

I seem to trigger it most often when using the left and right arrow keys on my keyboard to skip +/- 5 seconds, or when dragging the timeline to some arbitrary position.

I do NOT seem to trigger it when pressing the up/down arrows to go to the prev/next event. I can bang on the up/down keys like a wild monkey, and UI3 always starts playback within 1-2 seconds.

Curiously, I do NOT seem to be trigger it when dragging the start/end boxes for Convert/export clip. I can drag those back and forth like I'm playing a tiny violin, and the video updates instantly, in real time.

Other things that I think I've ruled out:

1. System load
   1. I see this on my "biggest" system with 26 cameras on a Core i7-6700/16 GB as well as on my smallest system with 6 cameras on the same CPU
   2. I've opened up the CPU monitor on the BI machine when triggering this behavior, and the CPU load is not spiking when this happens. In fact, it goes down, presumably because it's not rendering any video.
   3. I have seen this when reviewing four sub-streams from my 4 MP cameras, and I have seen this when reviewing a single, tiny Wyze-cam.
   4. All my cameras use sub-streams except for cameras that lack it, such as the Wyze.
2. HW Acceleration
   1. I turned this off on all my cameras, and it still occurs as frequently as when I had it on.
3. Storage schema
   1. My big box has 4 drives in a JBOD Storage Space over USB3, but I also see this in my small box, which has 1 storage drive directly connected via SATA, separate from the boot SSD.
4. OS and network
   1. I can trigger this in Chrome on the BI computer, connecting to localhost:81
   2. But I'm most frequently connecting from Chrome on a Mac, from another site. But I have 1000/1000 service in both locations, so bandwidth isn't the issue.
5. Phase of the Moon
   1. What makes this hard is that it's intermittent. Sometimes I'll browse footage for 20-30 minutes and not trigger the warning; other times I can't get through 5 minutes of review without seeing it every single time I skip forward or backward.

Could Chrome be the problem? I've been using Chrome because that's what was recommended back in 2021 because of some audio issues with Safari on macOS, but has the "best browser for BI" recommendation changed since then?

 

[bp2008]

@TheWaterbug
I haven't seen it happen when I use the timeline so I wonder if there is something special about your system that makes it happen.

Typically "video stream was lost" means the connection to Blue Iris (the one which was receiving video) was disconnected and UI3 had to open a new connection. There are a number of potential causes for that:

• Network trouble
• UI3 could have a bug where it does not realize it aborted the connection on purpose (this seems very unlikely, as it would be happening all the time to everyone)
• Something could be going wrong in Blue Iris which is causing it to top sending the video stream and close the network connection from its end. From the sound if it, this may be happening shortly after the stream has started, possibly before any video is sent.

 

[TheWaterbug]

@TheWaterbug
I haven't seen it happen when I use the timeline so I wonder if there is something special about your system that makes it happen.

Typically "video stream was lost" means the connection to Blue Iris (the one which was receiving video) was disconnected and UI3 had to open a new connection. There are a number of potential causes for that:

• Network trouble
• UI3 could have a bug where it does not realize it aborted the connection on purpose (this seems very unlikely, as it would be happening all the time to everyone)
• Something could be going wrong in Blue Iris which is causing it to top sending the video stream and close the network connection from its end. From the sound if it, this may be happening shortly after the stream has started, possibly before any video is sent.

Does UI3 have its own log? When I look at System Log in UI3 it looks like it's reporting what in the BI console's log, which is typically camera retries, etc., I don't see anything in the System Log about UI3 specifically, except for the login events.

 

[bp2008]

UI3 doesn't really log anything meaningful (mostly it is just text dumps of error toast messages that show), but what little it does log can be seen by opening the browser's developer tools and looking at the "Console". This log is not persisted anywhere. Once you reload the page it is gone. A lot of what you find in the console may actually just come from the web browser itself, like when Blue Iris sends a 404 response or something for PTZ thumbnail graphics it spams the console.