Odd Dahua interface issue: AKA: Sometimes weird stuff happens with camera systems

[Frankenscript]

Hi folks,

My system has been working fine for a couple years now. BI version 4.7something because I've been too lazy to upgrade to BI5 (eventually will, not today), or event update to the final BI4 build. Works great for what I use it for. Every now and then I add a camera or two...

Sometime late last year I added two 5631R-ZE Dahuas with longer zoom than I had before, and as a result I had a 5321R-Z that got orphaned until I got around to deciding where to put it. Over the weekend there was an incident in the neighborhood that I kinda sorta caught a little bit of at extreme range with a really crappy camera, so I decided to mount the 5321R-Z pointed in that direction to give better coverage of an intersection nearby. The physical installation went more quickly than expected, and because it was already configured with an IP address BI knew about, it fired right up and started saving to disc without any effort by me. Using the app on my phone I aimed it, and got the ladder inside just as the rain started.

I went in to the web interface to configure a few fine details when the problems started up.

The view in the web interface was weird; I was only seeing the upper left half or so in the live view on IE. Similar view in Blue Iris (via remote desktop) despite it looking proper on mobile app and in UI3. Then I noticed the camera PC was spiking in terms of CUP; usually it runs 30-40% but now it was 98-99. Poked all around the web app for the camera to fix the view without success, spent way too much time fussing around.
I also noticed I could only maintain a few frames per second in Chrome from my desktop via UI3.

I was wondering why adding one camera would upset a system with 10 existing similar cameras; recording was set direct to disc etc. all the usual. What could I have screwed up?

Well, it turns out that it was mostly just "weird stuff." I rebooted the camera PC; it processed some updates and then the processor use went back down to normal.

In BI it turns out I had apparently left a couple camera views "zoomed" in BI (not the physical lens zoom, just the view zoom) which explained why I saw unusual views for this camera (and one other actually, also same model) when looking in the BI main application.

Later I noticed that my Chrome UI3 setting had mysteriously changed from the usual streaming speed of 2160p to "JPG-HD" which I've never used before and apparently doesn't stream well; resetting this fixed the frame rate in Chrome.

So, all these things had perfectly rational, if perhaps poltergeist-initiated, explanations rather than me somehow screwing up the system by re-adding a camera that had been there before.

The only one I haven't figured out is the camera direct live view via IE Browser logon... the whole live view area is filled with a zoomed big image of about two thirds the camera's actual field of view. The browser is set to 100%; the live view is set to 100%. Picture below. Any ideas why this is showing a zoomed image?



You can see the HUGE text for the time overlay as result of the odd zooming. It does this whenever I go into a web session with the camera, persistently. All the Dahua cam live interfaces are doing this odd zooming; not the Hiks.

Any idea what that's about?

 

[Frankenscript]

I sorted the odd scaling out. It turns out it doesn't like the fact that the computer I was using as a client to remote into the BI PC was set to scaling at 150%. My current monitor for this RDP client is 4K and I run it at 150% scaling in display properties; somewhere along the way that borks the Dahua IE plug in (but not plugins for other cameras, apparently). Anyway problem solved. Hope this helps someone else sometime.