All cams offline

IAmATeaf

Known around here
Jan 13, 2019
3,375
3,358
United Kingdom
Came home yesterday night, wife tells me that the IOS app shows a red border around all the cams. Logged onto the PC and they had gone into this state at around 4:30pm, it was now around 8pm. There was nothing in the log file to even indicate that they had gone offline and nothing I did would bring them back, tried things like making a change to the cam settings and even restarting them. I could log onto each cam directly and check the stream with no issues.

Only a restart fixed it but I was wondering what I should do if this happens again, is there a trick to getting the cams back without restarting the PC?
 
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Only a restart fixed it but I was wondering what I should do if this happens again, is there a trick to getting the cams back without restarting the PC?
Two things I'd try would be trying to disable/re-enable a cameraI (using the right-click menu) then re-enabling it.
The other would be trying to restart the service (assuming you're running BI as such).

Both should cause BI to disconnect from the cameras and then reconnecting.
 
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I forgot to add, if you haven't already, check out the Watchdog tab on each camera. You can enable the "Fire alerts after: " option to be sent an Alert when BI loses a connection to the camera. Hopefully it won't happen again, but if it does you may be able to react more quickly. Also FWIW there is an option in the Blue Iris smartphone app that lets you reboot the BI PC remotely if you ever need to.
 
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I forgot to add, if you haven't already, check out the Watchdog tab on each camera. You can enable the "Fire alerts after: " option to be sent an Alert when BI loses a connection to the camera. Hopefully it won't happen again, but if it does you may be able to react more quickly. Also FWIW there is an option in the Blue Iris smartphone app that lets you reboot the BI PC remotely if you ever need to.

great advice. added it to newb guide
 
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Happened again today. A restart of the BI service and the cams all come back online. As I said before when BI states no signal I can logon to the cams direct and see that the video feed is fine. System has been running fine for a few months with no issues whatsoever.

No idea as to what the issue/problem might be.
 
It may be an intermittently bad switch. are all cameras coming through the same POE switch ? If so split the cameras across multiple switches.
Is the camera traffic passing through the router, this is a bad idea.
What message in the BI log?
What happens when you restart each camera individually from the BI console ?
 
All cams on same switch. Don’t have another spare to try at the moment. The first time I did try restarting all the cams but only 1 came back, the other 5 still had no signal.

The logs didn’t really have much in them, so yesterday for example it had single service stopped unexpectedly (or similar) when I restarted the BI service.