H265 selected on Camera, Blue Iris shows it at H264

[IggyCam]

I'm very new to Blue Iris, and to IP cameras in general, and I'm trying to figure out why two different 4MP cameras are using drastically different amounts of storage during recording.

The one camera that's using a lot of storage(Cam2) has been using up 4GB of storage to record about 28 minutes worth of video. The other camera(Cam4) is able to record 3 hours worth of video when using roughly 4GB of storage. There is not all that much movement going on with either of these cameras, they aren't looking at the same scene , but in my mind the scene that each is viewing is not really that much different, at least not enough that I would expect to see 6 times more storage used on the one vs the other.


I noticed that the camera that was using less storage was using H265 encoding, the one using larger amounts of storage was using H264 encoding.

I went into the web interface for the camera that is using the greater amount of storage and switched it to H265. However Blue Iris seems to continue to use H264 encoding, and I can't figure out why, or how to change it in Blue Iris.

If anyone can give me some pointers on how to deal with this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

[wittaj]

BI simply accepts what is being fed to it. BI cannot decide to decode H265 when you set up H264 or vice versa.

It sounds like a camera issue. Could even be a browser issue where you are setting it to H265 but the camera saves H264. We have seen that happen.

For most cameras, using Internet Explorer (yeah we know LOL but it is still available) or Pale Moon provide the best experiences to not only see all the settings, but also have them stick.

Keep in mind that not all manufacturers follow H265 standards and BI can whack out with some codec. Most here use H264 as that is the time tested standard.

 

[IggyCam]

I believe it's changed now. I'm not 100% sure what actually fixed it, but I think it was after I deleted the camera from Blue Iris and then added it again.

The reason I'm not 100% sure, is because prior to that I had downloaded and installed Pale Moon and went in and tried to save the CODEC with that browser. I don't think that is actually what fixed it however, because in the web browser, it had always displayed H265 , even before I had downloaded and installed Pale Moon, and when I first connected to the camera's web page via Pale Moon it indicted that it was already set to use H265. Anyway, even after saving and restarting the camera from Pale Moon, Blue Iris still seemed to believe that camera was still using H264.

Now, the camera is only using 300MB in it's first 14 minutes of recording, and previously it'd have used darn near 2GB in that amount of time.

I may have to keep investigating... from what I have read here and other places, just going from H624 to H265 isn't likely to change the amount of storage space used this significantly, or at least that is what I currently have come to believe

 

[wittaj]

If you didn't restart the camera in BI after making the change, it will still show the prior codec until the next "cut and clip" process is done. Default is every 8 hours.

That is correct, many of us haven't seen the savings H265 markets, and with all the other issues, the little savings it provides isn't worth the hassle.

 

[IggyCam]

If you didn't restart the camera in BI after making the change, it will still show the prior codec until the next "cut and clip" process is done. Default is every 8 hours.

That is correct, many of us haven't seen the savings H265 markets, and with all the other issues, the little savings it provides isn't worth the hassle.

I'm pretty sure I had restarted the cameras within Blue Iris, in addition to them having been restarted from their web interfaces too. I also know that I had actually stopped and restarted Blue Iris at least twice today while I was playing around with this stuff.


My 8MP camera is now using 7MB/min , where previously it was using 195MB/min.

While I still don't fully understand why I had two cameras that where chewing up huge amounts of storage and are now using much much less storage, I'm happy that I'm not burning through storage space so rapidly now.