Help! I am not sure what is wrong.

W

webstar3000

n3wb
Jan 11, 2019
5
2
nope
Hi,

After reading through this site I tried to setup a new system based on all of the recommendations.

Basically my cameras are freezing in BI and will only play one video at a time. When it triggers to record a video it looks like it starts recording and then freezes so then it never closes the trigger file / (and I cannot delete it or stop it unless I set the cameras inactive).

My setup:
1x IPC-HDW2231R-ZS
1x IPC-HDW5231R-ZE
2x HDBW4231F-AS

I purchased a dedicated windows machine with an i5 and 8gb of ram with BI. I have the 4 cameras on one POE switch and it is plugged directly into the BI machine on it's own subnet.

I added the 4 cameras into BI by just putting in the IP and letting BI figure out the rest. I changed a minimal amount of settings, such as "Do not re-encode and write directly to disk".

As much of the details on the issue I have found so far:
All four cameras now show up on BI, but only one of them (the one selected) will update. The others will just randomly update 1 frame after ~30sec. When I switch which camera is selected I notice that the CPU of BI will drop to 0% (when it was like 10-15%) and then when the CPU % of BI finally recovers (~10sec) the selected video will now play. If I look at the camera statistics I can see a bitrate coming from all the cameras even when they are frozen. I can have OpenPSS running at the same time and it will never freeze the video. As I mentioned before it seems that when the video freezes then it really messes up the trigger capture.

I tried messing with a bunch of settings but nothing has worked. I have no idea what else to try. I know this probably is not enough information to figure out the problem, but let me know what settings may have some influence and I will gladly dump all of the info.

Thanks!
 
webstar3000 said:
Hi,

After reading through this site I tried to setup a new system based on all of the recommendations.

Basically my cameras are freezing in BI and will only play one video at a time. When it triggers to record a video it looks like it starts recording and then freezes so then it never closes the trigger file / (and I cannot delete it or stop it unless I set the cameras inactive).

My setup:
1x IPC-HDW2231R-ZS
1x IPC-HDW5231R-ZE
2x HDBW4231F-AS

I purchased a dedicated windows machine with an i5 and 8gb of ram with BI. I have the 4 cameras on one POE switch and it is plugged directly into the BI machine on it's own subnet.

I added the 4 cameras into BI by just putting in the IP and letting BI figure out the rest. I changed a minimal amount of settings, such as "Do not re-encode and write directly to disk".

As much of the details on the issue I have found so far:
All four cameras now show up on BI, but only one of them (the one selected) will update. The others will just randomly update 1 frame after ~30sec. When I switch which camera is selected I notice that the CPU of BI will drop to 0% (when it was like 10-15%) and then when the CPU % of BI finally recovers (~10sec) the selected video will now play. If I look at the camera statistics I can see a bitrate coming from all the cameras even when they are frozen. I can have OpenPSS running at the same time and it will never freeze the video. As I mentioned before it seems that when the video freezes then it really messes up the trigger capture.

I tried messing with a bunch of settings but nothing has worked. I have no idea what else to try. I know this probably is not enough information to figure out the problem, but let me know what settings may have some influence and I will gladly dump all of the info.

Thanks!
Click to expand...
post your camera video settings as well as blue iris, record tab, video tab AND video>configure tab.
 
Here is all the configurations.

I was actually just doing a ton more tests of settings and think I may have found the problem. I had the "smart codec" on and turning that off on all of the cameras may have fixed the issue. I will run a test overnight and will post the results. Would you still take a glance at the settings and see if anything could be better? I only have 4 cameras and so I seem to have plenty of resources on by BI box. My goal is to only record when motion is detected and when it is to save a great quality file with maximum compression. Once I get the VPN setup I plan to stream to my phone which is why I enabled the substream, but I don't know if those are good phone settings either.

Thank you!

View media item 83View media item 84View media item 86View media item 85
 
webstar3000 said:
Here is all the configurations.

I was actually just doing a ton more tests of settings and think I may have found the problem. I had the "smart codec" on and turning that off on all of the cameras may have fixed the issue. I will run a test overnight and will post the results. Would you still take a glance at the settings and see if anything could be better? I only have 4 cameras and so I seem to have plenty of resources on by BI box. My goal is to only record when motion is detected and when it is to save a great quality file with maximum compression. Once I get the VPN setup I plan to stream to my phone which is why I enabled the substream, but I don't know if those are good phone settings either.

Thank you!

View media item 83View media item 84View media item 86View media item 85
Click to expand...
uncheck limit decoding.
also in file format in the record tab make sure you set it to direct to disk and BVR
 
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I'd change the encoding to H264H as well, unless Ken fixed BI to handle H265 and I missed that.
 
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Yes, H.265 decoding isn't going to work if you've got Intel hardware acceleration enabled. Last I checked, BI would automatically detect the failure and turn off hardware acceleration for the camera, but that was many months ago when I last checked.

You can see which type of hardware acceleration you have enabled globally (if any) on Blue Iris Options > Cameras tab. Each camera has an override option in camera properties > Video > Hardware accelerated decode. A value of "Default" here means it will use whatever was configured globally.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions. I will update the settings. It does appear like the smart codec was my main problem, the records last night went well.

I think my default hardware accelerated decode is set to None. When I enabled it once I would no longer get any picture from the camera. I cannot remember if I had H.265 or H.254H enabled at the time. If I swap to H.264H and can enable hardware accelerated decoding will that essentially be like saving CPU usage over losing a bit of compression ratio?

Thanks again
 
AFAIK, BI still works best with h.264. the extra compression resulting from h.265 is just not needed, for the most part.
maybe if you were very congested on the network, it would be worth it, but usually not.

when you enable intel hw decoding, you need to restart the BI service to take effect...
 
I believe camera restarts are all that is necessary to toggle between hardware decoding modes. The only reason it says to restart Blue Iris is that there is no other mechanism to restart all cameras at once.
 
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