Blue Iris posting empty pictures randomly

guz

n3wb
Sep 2, 2019
3
0
Poland
Dear All,
I've been reading this forum for some time and usually was able to find what I needed. Today I stepped on an issue which I could not trace by myself.
I've been using BI for more than a year at house. Recently I've set up capturing of pictures every 60s in the Post menu in BI. The problem is that randomly, quite often (like every few picures), the picture is recorded empty (i.e. it contains a pictogram and is of ca. 3kb size).
Zrzut ekranu 2025-08-12 o 01.17.01.png
When I open BI on the computer (it works as a service), usually it posts a good picture at once. The picture is taken a the full minute time eg. 19:13:00, i.e. in the time when recording the motion picture happens.
The picture is uploaded to a remote FTP location successfully. The problem is that the file is often containig only a dummy symbol of picture. I tested with a local path as well. Same story.
Have I set anything wrong? I know, there are other ways to do this, but I think that such function is something basic and simple, and should probably just work. So I guess, there's some setting I need to do.
The motion footage is recorded well. If I add recording JPGs in the Record menu, they are captured fine.

BI 5.9.9.11, 5 cameras, Xeon CPU, Nvidia K620.

PostmenuIB.jpg

Recording is set up for few seconds every minute, just to be able to view a kind of time lapse.

1754952004354.png
 
Look at the camera status window and make sure the FPS/Key rate is set to 1, might fix the problem if it is not set to 1
 
Thanks, Bruce.
I think it's been set to 1.

Zrzut ekranu 2025-08-12 o 21.20.01.png
Any other ideas, people, please? Has anybody met such behavior? DB fixed, no change.
Video stream is H265. Does it impact anyhow?
Regards
 
I changed to H264 and the issue went away. Thanks Bruce.
Wouldn't it be nice if H265 worked as well?
I'm using H265 across other cameras and it works, in general. Just apart from that snapshot, AFAIK.
 
For good measure, make sure "Hardware decode" is set to "No" in the Video tab. Also make sure "Limit decoding unless required" is unchecked. It also should not hurt to delete the camera from Blue Iris and add it again from scratch to make sure it has a 100% fresh configuration in case an obscure setting got corrupted or overlooked.

I've been using the same JPEG Post to FTP server feature for many years with several cameras, on more than one Blue Iris server. It should work with all resolutions and video codecs.

One of my cams using it, for example, is a 4K cam with a rather unusual configuration:

Main stream: H.265 3840x2160, 6 FPS, 12 iframe interval, 12 Mbps bit rate.
Sub stream: H.264 1920x1080, 10 FPS, 20 iframe interval, 1 Mbps bit rate.

Due to my camera configuration allowing 0-333.33ms exposures, the frame rate drops to 3 FPS at night (to accommodate 1/3 second exposures) while the iframe interval remains the same at 12 for main stream and 20 for sub stream.

And yet even with all this complexity, long iframe interval, mismatched frame rates and iframe intervals, and using a different codec for main vs sub stream, it uploads main stream pictures to my FTP server every 10 minutes just fine and has been doing so for years. There was not even a break during December 5-10th when BI 5.9.9.11 was the latest available and I was running that exact version.