Blue Iris UI3

MrRobinHood

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How can I tell which camera the default audio is coming from on the overlay timeline view? And is this changeable?
 

bp2008

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What is "the overlay timeline view"?

When viewing a camera group in UI3, all the audio streams from the visible cameras are combined into one stream by Blue Iris. Not changeable as far as I know.

On UI3's timeline tab, Blue Iris only sends audio when you are LIVE, not when looking at past clips.
 

TheWaterbug

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What can I do to troubleshoot the dreaded "The video stream was lost. Attempting to reconnect..." messages? Running BI 5.6.5.4 with 18 modest cameras on an i7-6700 (see .sig).
Based on this thread I turned off HA on my box, and halle-freakin-lujah, I think this may have solved this problem. I've been banging on the arrow keys like a wild monkey for the last 30 minutes, and I've yet to see the dreaded error. Even with all 23 cameras on the timeline the video always recovers and starts playing within 2-3 seconds, and with 4 cameras on the timeline it recovers within a fraction of a second.

If this holds up it will make my daily footage review sooooo much better!
 

MrRobinHood

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What is "the overlay timeline view"?

When viewing a camera group in UI3, all the audio streams from the visible cameras are combined into one stream by Blue Iris. Not changeable as far as I know.

On UI3's timeline tab, Blue Iris only sends audio when you are LIVE, not when looking at past clips.
I mean the screen where you see all the thumbnails, the main timeline view.

So it's a combined stream, right, I see, thanks for the clarification.
 

TheWaterbug

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Based on this thread I turned off HA on my box, and halle-freakin-lujah, I think this may have solved this problem. I've been banging on the arrow keys like a wild monkey for the last 30 minutes, and I've yet to see the dreaded error. Even with all 23 cameras on the timeline the video always recovers and starts playing within 2-3 seconds, and with 4 cameras on the timeline it recovers within a fraction of a second.

If this holds up it will make my daily footage review sooooo much better!
Nope. It's back this morning :mad:
 

gurpal2000

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Additional hack suggestion: Wrap your iframe in another card (e.g stack-in-card) and then set overflow:hidden to the stack-in-card. Then apply negative margin-bottom to your iframe-card. Could even set the margin as a variable that you could then control with a toggle switch, automation etc...
Like this? I'm still able to click and bring up the BI menu/etc

Code:
views:
  - type: custom:grid-layout
    layout:
      grid-template-rows: 65% 35%
      grid-template-areas: |
        "top"
        "bottom"
    cards:
      - type: picture
        image: https://demo.home-assistant.io/stub_config/t-shirt-promo.png
        tap_action:
          action: none
        hold_action:
          action: none
      - type: custom:stack-in-card
        mode: horizontal
        cards:
          - type: iframe
            url: >-
              http://xxxxxxx:81/ui3.htm?tab=live&maximize=1&timeout=0&cam=Cam3&streamingprofile=480p
            aspect_ratio: '16:9'
            card_mod:
              style: |
                margin-bottom: -100px
        card_mod:
          style: |
            overflow: hidden
 

bigscout79

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I think I read all 214 pages! Thank you for this very helpful addition to BI.

I read the help and searched, but can't seem to find an answer.

1. Is it possible to pass in 'auto-maximize' (on motion) as a URL parm? If so, what is the syntax? I am guessing not, but thought I'd ask. It would be helpful for kiosk type/tv type devices without mice or good input options.

2. the auto-maximize works great on my computer, but on a FireStick in Silk doesn't show triggered cam full screen even when enabled (via ui-settings->video->auto-maximize = yes)

Thanks!
 

bp2008

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I think I read all 214 pages! Thank you for this very helpful addition to BI.

I read the help and searched, but can't seem to find an answer.

1. Is it possible to pass in 'auto-maximize' (on motion) as a URL parm? If so, what is the syntax? I am guessing not, but thought I'd ask. It would be helpful for kiosk type/tv type devices without mice or good input options.

2. the auto-maximize works great on my computer, but on a FireStick in Silk doesn't show triggered cam full screen even when enabled (via ui-settings->video->auto-maximize = yes)

Thanks!
Hi.
For #1 you are correct, there is no URL parameter.
For #2, I have no idea why it would not work.
 

actran

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Upgraded to UI3 version 268, Blue Iris version: 5.8.9.3. I now see this warning:
Blue Iris did not provide an offset in milliseconds for this alert, so it may being at the wrong position
no offset.png
for 1 cam, for every alert. I tested alert playback for 16 other cams and do not see this warning.

I suspect that this warning is related to BI5 v5.8.9.x release where Ken added additional configs around pre-triggers:
record.png

Does the 20 secs pre-trigger aggravate the problem? My other cams typically have pre-trigger of 5 secs.

Related, I saw this warning when trying to do alert playback while the alert is still being recorded. It complains about non BVR format when the alert is configured to record in that format. I don't get this warning after the file is done recording the alert event.not bvr.pngbvr settings.png

P.S. After BI5 upgrade, I did do browser clear cache/history just to be sure. I also tried Chrome incognito mode. Same warning about time offset every time when doing alert playback for this 1 cam.
 

jrbeddow

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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?
 

likeaw

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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?
Yeah, this problem was so bad on Chrome that I actually tried Firefox...and seems to work fine using that browser, so possible they are doing something with Chrome on the newer versions. I would also like a solution so I don't have 2 browsers installed on my phone. Wow, been a while since I posted this, time sure flies when you get old.
 

bp2008

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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

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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

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Nope. It's back this morning :mad:
"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

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@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

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@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

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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.
 

jrbeddow

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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.
Have you given any further consideration to workarounds for this issue? I've tried the suggestion to use Firefox on mobile devices (it's already my preferred browser in a desktop), and although it initially looked promising, the error message did eventually show up there as well. If I switch to the Javascript player, I eventually see the orange clock timer symbol, despite lightly lengthening the timeouts (ie: within reason).
 
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