Advice on cleaning up recordings

[simonmason]

I recently installed 4 Reolink h.265 RLC-820a cameras and installed Blue Iris so I am learning how to set these up.

I added the cameras using their SD and HD feeds separately so I can record them independently which I understand you cannot do in BI.

So I am recording the SD version of the camera 24 hours. That is working fine and the recordings playback with no issues.

I am then recording the HD version based on motion. These recordings are not working well. I initially had the hardware acceleration set to Intel+VPP. I am running an i7-9700.

On recorded clips I am getting two issues.

1) in nightvision the entire frame is routinely showing grey with only the moving section actually showing.

2) in playback of the color clips it drops most of the frames. If I playback on the host PC it displays about 7-10 frames over 30 seconds. If I playback on the web or app it is worse, only displaying 2-3 frames. When I export to MP4 it is the same thing.

I tried turning off hardware acceleration as suggested in the forums but that did not make any difference. I saw lots of other suggestions for solving these issues but they were on posts that were several years old so I thought I would post here to get advice. I have also included some screen shots of my configuration and can provide more as necessary. Thanks for the help.

 

[biggen]

Have you tried disabling the SD feed and recording only the HD feed and seeing if the problem persists?

 

[simonmason]

Good idea, hadn't thought of that. Will try that now.

 

[The Automation Guy]

I will say that getting Reolink cameras to work well in BI can be a challenge. This is because Reolink doesn't implement user defined i-frames - at least not historically (I can't speak for more recent cameras as I don't pay Reolink any attention). This failure causes all sorts of stability issues with the stream. You can check to see if they allow you to change the iframes rate in the camera settings. If they do, it should be a setting that you can change in the camera in the section where you choose the stream resolution, framerate, bitrate, etc. If you see this option, you should set it to be either equal to or double your frame rate. So if you are recording 15 frames/sec, your iframe should be 15 or 30. Setting it to anything else can cause stability issues.

Now that being said, I have a Reolink RLC-410 which was one of my first CCTV camera purchases. I had it long before I found BlueIris or this forum. I have since moved on to much better cameras, but I still use the 410 in my system. It is not in a "critical" area, but I had it so why not use it! Even though I can't change the iframe rate, I can get a stable stream in BI with that camera most of the time. (The image quality sucks, but that is different from a stability issue). However, there are times when the camera will be "Not Found" in BI for hours. This doesn't happen very often and it does come back online if I just leave everything alone.

I have no experience with the 820a models. It may be that you will never be able to get them working reliably, especially if there is no iframe setting on the camera.

 

[simonmason]

Hi thanks for the post @The Automation Guy. I am new to this and didn't even know what an iframe is - After looking into this and doing some research I have discovered that the cameras don't currently support it but that firmware upgrades are imminent. There is also a very active discussion in their reddit channel about improvements they are making to the cameras to support Blue Iris, etc. So again thanks for the pointer.

I am using BI for DVR and motion sensing mostly. I use the Reolink IOS app for viewing the cameras as the BI app is a little clunky - but just my preference. I am not a professional, but for my small home installation the Reolink cameras are working out well and the company is extremely responsive on technical support.

I am also perfectly happy recording the SD streams for now. The quality is more than enough for my purposes. One thing I wanted to confirm - there is no way to record the SD stream vs. the HD stream? I setup duplicate cameras to accomplish this as it doesn't seem like the software will allow this with only one camera setup?

 

[wittaj]

If you can return them, do LOL. I highly doubt a firmware update will add iframes, so let's all be surprised...

Please provide a quick video snippet of a nighttime video showing how these cameras are working out well. We have yet to have someone that says they work well or the video is perfect provide a video that is that, so maybe you can be the first!

Try recording it without HA - The cameras are probably using a codec that doesn't play well with BI. Or try H264 and simply the Intel HA

Here is why Blue Iris and Reolinks do not work well together.

This was a screenshot of a member here where they had set these cameras to 15FPS within the cameras (I suspect you will be missing motion that you do not know you are missing....):

Now look at they key - that is the iframes. Blue Iris works best when the FPS and the iframes match. Now this is a ratio, so it should be a 1 if it matches the FPS. The iframes not matching (that you cannot fix or change with a reolink) is why they miss motion in Blue Iris and why people have problems. This is mainly why people are having issues with these cameras and there are many threads showing the issues people have with this manufacturer and Blue Iris. It is these same games that make the camera look great as a still image or video but turn to crap once motion is introduced.

The Blue Iris developer has indicated that for best reliability, sub stream frame rate should be equal to the main stream frame rate and these cameras cannot do that and there is nothing you can do about that with these cameras... The iframe rates (something these cameras do not allow you to set) should equal the FPS, but at worse case be no more than double. This example shows the cameras going down to a keyrate of 0.25 means that the iframe rates are over 4 times the FPS and that is why motion detection is a disaster with these cameras and Blue Iris...A value of 0.5 or less is considered insufficient to trust for motion triggers reliably...try to do AI Tools or the newly implemented DeepStack integration and it will be useless...

Compounding the matter even worse...motion detection is based on the substream and look at the substream FPS - in the example above, they dropped down to below 6 FPS with an iframe/key rate of 0.25 - you will miss motion most of the time with that issue...

Blue Iris is great and works with probably more camera brands than most VMS programs, but there are brands that don't work well or not at all - Rings, Arlos, Nest, Some Zmodo cams use proprietary systems and cannot be used with Blue Iris, and for a lot of people Reolink doesn't work well either because they manipulate the parameters to provide a nice clean image when there is no motion, but then motion is poor.

Now compare above to mine and cameras that follow industry standards that allow you to actually set parameters and they don't manipulate them. You will see that my FPS match what I set in the camera, and the 1.00 key means the iframe matches:

 

[wittaj]

You mention a firmware update coming, well here is a great post in another thread posted by @austwhite just today talking about a firmware update just released:

I know this is an older thread, and who knows if anyone will read to the end to see this anyway, but I want to put my experience with REOLINK in here and why I agree with all the negative reviews of REOLINK.

I have used 3 REOLINK cameras. 2 RLC-520, 5MP and a RLC-822A 8MP (3x optical zoom)

Firstly. There is virtually no difference in quality between the 5MP and 8MP cameras. This indicates poor quality sensors, or fake advertising. Only difference I saw was the 8MP was 16:9 and the 5MP was 4:3.

Secondly. I have ultimate proof REOLINK are LYING to everyone of their customers. Forget the iFrame controversy that has already been aired.

Today, 19 April 2021, I went to their Website to download "latest firmware" They advertise the firmware on the website as being a V3.x.x version released on 4 April 2021.

The downloaded file on ALL camera's that have this advertised firmware version and date (not just my one) is actually version 1.0.266 from 11 December 2020. They renamed the file to try and fool us, but the date stamp on the file creation still shows 11/12/2020. Who actually knows if this is even the right date for the firmware, it just happens to be the timestamp on the file....

Sure, REOLINK Support responds quickly, but they fact that EVERY firmware version on their download site is a lie is enough to make you not trust this company.

Add to this that the night vision is unusable and no adjustable iFrame interval and you can see why people on this forum have a dislike of REOLINK.

I gave them the benefit of good reviews on other sites and have regretted it. Sure, day time with bright light works well, but who is going to do something illegal in the middle of the day when there is bright light everywhere.........

Just my opinion but maybe it will help someone who may be slightly on the fence

Reolink?

In fairness to the Reolink it is darker behind the house. So, here's a partial frame from a Dahua 4231, 2MP, no IR, obviously, and just a different angle - Incidentally, there is no smearing of the image from the 5442 even with vehicles doing 50MPH or better, yeah we have idiots here too.

ipcamtalk.com