Camera playback @ 1x speed is very slow and choppy, then super fast, then slow and choppy. Settings issue?

talisman2208

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Just as the thread reads - when I play back and video it plays back super slow and choppy then it goes really fast, like it's fast fowarding, then goes back to slow and choppy.

I thought this may have been a bandwidth issue, but I checked and it is not. I think it may be a frame rate / keystone issue? Here are my camera settings:

Within the camera itself:

1675712212480.png



And the BI settings for that specific camera:




1675712402461.png

1675712413854.png
 

looney2ns

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Is this a Wifi camera?
Make and model would help.

Since you are recording continuous, set combine and cut to 1hr, instead of 8.
What are the specs of the BI computer?
 

Philip Gonzales

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Just as the thread reads - when I play back and video it plays back super slow and choppy then it goes really fast, like it's fast fowarding, then goes back to slow and choppy.

I thought this may have been a bandwidth issue, but I checked and it is not. I think it may be a frame rate / keystone issue? Here are my camera settings:

Within the camera itself:

View attachment 153373



And the BI settings for that specific camera:



View attachment 153375

View attachment 153376
Is this camera hardwired? The only time I personally have issues with playback is on one of my cameras that I am using a Powerline adaptor for. I'm pretty sure that is the cause for me at least, just need to make time to run an ethernet cable to this camera.
 

bp2008

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That is interesting. I had no idea Blue Iris would accept an entire URI in the sub stream path field.

Lets try to narrow this down some more.

1. This issue happens in the Blue Iris application itself (you are not remote viewing)?
2. Are you viewing via a local physically connected monitor or via some kind of remote desktop connection?
3. Does the issue happen only when playing clips?
4. Only the latest clip that is still open for recording?
5. Or also when playing live video?
6. Is your CPU or memory usage nearly full?
7. Look in Blue Iris Status window > Cameras tab, compare the "FPS/key" column with the "Sub FPS/key" column. They should show more or less the same frame rate and both values should end with /1.00 or very close to it, indicating 1 key frame per second.
 

talisman2208

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Is this a Wifi camera?
Make and model would help.

Since you are recording continuous, set combine and cut to 1hr, instead of 8.
What are the specs of the BI computer?

They are wifi cameras, Amcrest IP4M-1041B.

Copy, will set to 1 hr.

It's an INTEL NUC8I7HVK with 32GB of ram and a 2TB NVME Drive. Should be more than powerful enough, yes?
 

talisman2208

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That is interesting. I had no idea Blue Iris would accept an entire URI in the sub stream path field.

Lets try to narrow this down some more.

1. This issue happens in the Blue Iris application itself (you are not remote viewing)?
2. Are you viewing via a local physically connected monitor or via some kind of remote desktop connection?
3. Does the issue happen only when playing clips?
4. Only the latest clip that is still open for recording?
5. Or also when playing live video?
6. Is your CPU or memory usage nearly full?
7. Look in Blue Iris Status window > Cameras tab, compare the "FPS/key" column with the "Sub FPS/key" column. They should show more or less the same frame rate and both values should end with /1.00 or very close to it, indicating 1 key frame per second.

Thanks for the help!


1. This issue happens in the Blue Iris application itself (you are not remote viewing)?

Yes


2. Are you viewing via a local physically connected monitor or via some kind of remote desktop connection?

Viewing on the BI computer itself on the monitor connected to the BI computer itself

3. Does the issue happen only when playing clips?

No, it also happens when viewing the clips just through the monitor without playing back (sometimes)

4. Only the latest clip that is still open for recording?

Seems to be random

5. Or also when playing live video?

Live video as well

6. Is your CPU or memory usage nearly full?

25% cpu 1.9gb ram out of 32

7. Look in Blue Iris Status window > Cameras tab, compare the "FPS/key" column with the "Sub FPS/key" column. They should show more or less the same frame rate and both values should end with /1.00 or very close to it, indicating 1

1675728958378.png
 

wittaj

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Wifi cams and a NUC - there is the problem... NUCs are not designed for 24/7 operation and we have seen many people come here with issues trying to use them for BI. Maybe not right away, but over time as the CPU starts throttling to favor cooling over performance.

That NUC is an i7 8th gen and in a computer form that CPU load would be single digits. I have way more cameras than you on a 4th gen running less than half the CPU% you are. That probably means a throttling or bottleneck somewhere in the system.

Pull up the task manager and see if the drive is being taxed. We have seen several using a NUC where the drive is pegging at 100%

Are your cameras going thru the router or are they separated by either dual NIC or VLAN?

Wifi and cameras do not go together.

There are always ways if you don't want to run an ethernet cable.

You need power anyway, so go with a powerline adapter to run the date over your electric lines or use a nano-station.

Maybe you are fine now one day with wifi cams, but one day something will happen. A new device, neighbors microwave, etc.

Cameras connected to Wifi routers (whether wifi or not) are problematic for surveillance cameras because they are always streaming and passing data. And the data demands go up with motion and then you lose signal. A lost packet and it has to resend. It can bring the whole network down if trying to send cameras through a wifi router. At the very least it can slow down your entire system.

Unlike Netflix and other streaming services that buffer a movie, these cameras do not buffer up part of the video, so drop outs are frequent, especially once you start adding distance. You would be amazed how much streaming services buffer - don't believe me, start watching something and unplug your router and watch how much longer you can watch NetFlix before it freezes - mine goes 45 seconds. Now do the same with a camera connected to a router and it is fairly instantaneous (within the latency of the stream itself)...

The same issue applies even with the hard-wired cameras trying to send all this non-buffer video stream through a router. Most consumer grade wifi routers are not designed to pass the constant video stream data of cameras, and since they do not buffer, you get these issues. The consumer routers are just not designed for this kind of traffic, even a GB speed router.

So the more cameras you add, the bigger the potential for issues.

Many people unfortunately think wifi cameras are the answer and they are not. People will say what about Ring and Nest - well that is another whole host of issues that we will not discuss here LOL, but they are not streaming 24/7, only when you pull up the app. And then we see all the people come here after that system failed them because their wifi couldn't keep up when the perp came by. For streaming 24/7 to something like an NVR or Blue Iris, forget about it if you want reliability.
 
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talisman2208

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@wittaj Thanks for the write up, and I'll agree with you, wifi cams are not the way to go - unfortunately it's my only option right now. I understand I can't ELIMINATE my problem, but what are my best options for ALLEVIATING?

As far as the NUC goes, I don't think it's the problem It's a 2TB NVME drive sitting at 1% utilization. CPU temp is 65C average, and my core usage is about 30% average. None of the cores are throttling.

My cameras are going through the router, there is no NIC and no VLAN.

So, NIC? VLAN? Powerline Adapter? Nano-Station?
 

wittaj

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OK everything going thru the router can certainly be the problem in some situations.

Can you add substreams to Cam7, 8, and the PTZ to further reduce bandwidth issues?

So how is the wifi cam being powered now? A powerline adapter usually works well - certainly better than wifi. I have been using one for over 10 years on a camera I keep waiting to get around to running the POE to LOL.

Or do you have an old spare router that you could setup just for the wifi cam and not give that router internet access? Many have done that successfully for a cam or two and made all the difference in the world from when they had it on their main router.

The simple thing would be to add another ethernet port and dual NIC it, but I doubt there is room for it? If not, then use the built-in ethernet port for the cameras and add a USB ethernet for your internet.
 

bp2008

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The configuration and CPU/memory load and CPU temperature all look just fine.

The problem is likely the fact you have the cameras connected with wifi. Let me put it this way: I have 24 cameras right now, and my Blue Iris log shows 64 dropouts and reconnects so far this month. 59 of those are one camera, and yup, you guessed it, it is the one camera I have connected with wifi. It is a doorbell cam so it has no wired network interface on it :(

Is the NUC using wifi too? If so, hard wire that thing and disable the wifi adapter.

Can you add substreams to Cam7, 8, and the PTZ to further reduce bandwidth issues?
Adding a substream will only make the bandwidth issues a little worse actually since Blue Iris never stops downloading the main stream.
 

talisman2208

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The simple thing would be to add another ethernet port and dual NIC it, but I doubt there is room for it? If not, then use the built-in ethernet port for the cameras and add a USB ethernet for your internet.
[/QUOTE]

Wait doesn't my NUC already have dual NIC?

It has a i219-LM and i210-AT controller each with its own port.
 

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talisman2208

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Is the NUC using wifi too? If so, hard wire that thing and disable the wifi adapter.
The nuc is hardwired in and I'm using an ASUS RT-AC88U. It's hardly an entry level router, but not state of the art. It was nice in 2015. lol

Should I just update the router? I can't believe a few wifi cams zipping low bitrate video 24/7 would throttle the network on that thing. But maybe they do.
 

bp2008

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I would not worry about an RT-AC88U getting bogged down from that little amount of traffic going through it.

If you want to gather some empirical data on your wifi performance, you can try pinging all the cameras and looking at the response times. This is easy via an app I wrote called PingTracer. Just download and extract that, run it, and enter the IP addresses of all your cameras, comma separated, into the "Host" box and click the start button.

Then increase the ping rate to about 3 pings per second and see how the graphs look over time. A well functioning wifi network should be about 3 ms or less of latency with very few spikes higher than that.
 

wittaj

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You would be surprised. As I said, these do not buffer like every other device you have.

We have seen many here with issues just like this associated with wifi cams. They either remove the wifi cams and get cams off the router and watch it improve or deny that is the problem and continue with their problems.

But what else is on that router - how many devices, etc. Too many and it will struggle.

@SouthernYankee summed it up best here (copied below)

I did a WIFI test a while back with multiple 2MP cameras each camera was set to VBR, 15 FPS, 15 Iframe, 3072kbs, h.264. Using a WIFI analyzer I selected the least busy channel (1,6,11) on the 2.4 GHZ band and set up a separate access point. With 3 cameras in direct line of sight of the AP about 25 feet away I was able to maintain a reasonable stable network with only intermittent signal drops from the cameras. Added a 4th camera and the network became totally unstable. Also add a lot of motion to the 3 cameras caused some more network instability. More data more instability.

The cameras are nearly continuously transmitting. So any lost packet causes a retry, which cause more traffic, which causes more lost packets.

WIFI does not have a flow control, or a token to transmit. So your devices transmit any time they want, more devices more collisions.

As a side note, it is very easy to jam a WIFI network. WIFI is fine for watching the bird feed but not for home surveillance and security.

The problem is like standing in a room, with multiple people talking to you at the same time about different subjects. You need to answer each person or they repeat the question.

Test do not guess.

For a 802.11G 2.4 GHZ WIFI network the Theoretical Speed is 54Mbps (6.7MBs) real word speed is nearer to 10-29Mbps (1.25-3.6 MBs) for a single channel
 

talisman2208

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I would not worry about an RT-AC88U getting bogged down from that little amount of traffic going through it.

If you want to gather some empirical data on your wifi performance, you can try pinging all the cameras and looking at the response times. This is easy via an app I wrote called PingTracer. Just download and extract that, run it, and enter the IP addresses of all your cameras, comma separated, into the "Host" box and click the start button.

Then increase the ping rate to about 3 pings per second and see how the graphs look over time. A well functioning wifi network should be about 3 ms or less of latency with very few spikes higher than that.

So uh... how bad is it doc? Looks pretty bad - Interestingly enough the one camera .123 looks okay, but it's connected to a different 88U in the garage acting as a Mesh Node. That looks BAD

1675733591008.png
 

bp2008

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Well that is not great :)

Like you said .123 is a lot better than the others.

There are several things you can do to try to improve the situation.

Any cameras that have 5 GHz capability, try putting them on a wifi network that is 5 GHz only. 5 GHz networks tend to perform better than 2.4 GHz, as long as the client devices are in range.

If you're using 2.4 GHz wifi, make sure the channel width is set to 20 MHz (NOT 40 MHz or 20/40 MHz. Just 20 MHz). Don't let the radio choose a channel automatically. Choose the channel manually, and only choose 1, 6, or 11. Even if there are other networks already using all 3 of those. Never use any of the in-between channels (2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10) because that is the wifi equivalent of double parking in a lot that only has 3 parking spaces.

To choose which channel is best, get a wifi analyzer app on your phone and see which channels have the least interference in your area, and put your wifi networks on the quietest channels.

Here's a screen capture I found on google of a heavily congested area with a lot of badly configured 2.4 GHz networks. Hopefully your area doesn't look like that.

1675733963747.png

In that screenshot there are five networks not following the 1,6,11 rule, which is a really shitty situation but one that is really hard to avoid because almost nobody configures their wifi networks optimally. If I was in that situation, then, well, first I would cry a little, and then I would put my 2.4 GHz network on channel 1 because it has the lowest amount of noise.
 

talisman2208

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Looksoke my network (pattys) is the only network using those channels.

Patty's but att is my fiber modem but nothing is really connected to that.

So what's my best option? Dedicated router for these devices? Ethernet over Power? I'd love to poe but I just can't.



Screenshot_20230206_205713_WiFi Analyzer.jpg
 

Philip Gonzales

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Looksoke my network (pattys) is the only network using those channels.

Patty's but att is my fiber modem but nothing is really connected to that.

So what's my best option? Dedicated router for these devices? Ethernet over Power? I'd love to poe but I just can't.



View attachment 153445
Hardwired or bust! See my previous post. I'm using powerline adaptors (Ethernet over power) for one camera and that is the only camera I have issues with. YMMV, but probably not. Lol
 

bp2008

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Based on the picture above, your networks are centered on channel 10 so they are not following the 1,6,11 rule, and therefore they are slightly in conflict with the networks on channel 6. I also recommend you turn off the network you don't use. Or you could try moving a camera or two to it in order to free up some airtime on the upper channels.

Powerline network adapters would be far better of course. Also note you can do ethernet over coax if your house is wired for cable TV. That is typically even more reliable than ethernet over powerline. I was lucky in my house, as they had cat5e and coax both run to most rooms. Although the cat5e was only being used for telephone jacks, it was easy to reterminate all of them to RJ45.
 
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