What is causing - - > HW Encode failed error

D

D0T-C0M

Getting the hang of it
Feb 21, 2021
104
29
NB, Canada
I noticed that often (but not always) after my IPC-T5442T-ZE camera detects motion I often get a

HW Encode
setup failed: '- 22 for recording 0'

I have the camera's main stream at the highest resolution 30fps using h.265 with iframes set to 30. The substream is using D1 resolution 30fps h.265 i-frames 30 and I have all cameras using record directly to disk.

This camera has dual streaming so I'm assuming when this camera detects motion and transfers to the main stream for recording that's when it encounters this error. The error doesn't always come up either which is odd.

Im using a dedicated i5-6500 server with intel decoding set as default.

Any idea what causes this or possible fixes?
 
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Keep in mind that these cameras, although are spec'd and capable of these various parameters, real world testing shows if you try to run these cameras at 30fps and high bitrates that you will max out the CPU in the camera and then the camera bugs out just long enough that you miss something. My car is rated for 6,000RPM redline, but I am not gonna run it in 3rd gear on the highway at 6,000RPM...same with these types of cameras - gotta keep them under rated capacity.

Look at all the threads where people came here with a jitter in the video or IVS missing motion and they were running 30FPS and when people tell them to drop the FPS and they dropped the FPS to 15FPS the camera became stable.

Plus movies for the big screen are shot in 24FPS, so I think for our tablets, mobile devices, and monitors do not need more than a multi-million dollar movie studio production....15FPS is fine for our cameras....

Now that issue may or may not be related, but keep in mind some recent BI updates have been buggy with HW so many have turned it off and reintroduce one camera at a time. Sometimes deleting the camera and re-adding it can fix it, as can going to H264 with HW.
 
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Thanks for the detailed response. so you think it might be the camera and not BI, interesting. I'll try reducing the FPS to 20 as I probably don't need 30 for identifying people that are walking, I have another camera running the same resolution but its max camera FPS rate is 20 and I haven't run into any issues there so you might be on to something.

I thought h264 was limited in resolution and couldn't do 4k resolutions?
 
The camera may or may not be the issue, but if the camera does bug out for a split second, I could see HW bugging out.

H264 can do 4k resolution. People read that H265 is better and uses less storage, but most of us have seen less than a 10% savings. Mine is within minutes of H264 versus H265, so I went with H264 as I feel like most of my cameras look better at H264.
 
I tried lowering the FPS to 20 and also tried lowering the bitrate and I'm still getting this error. I've got a T5442TM-AS camera running the same firmware and settings and I'm not getting any HW Encode errors in BI with that one. I started a ticket with Blue Iris to see if they have any insight.
 
Confirm that the correct HW is being selected at the camera itself - you may have accidentally pulled the wrong HW decode.

Did you try the delete the camera and re-add it back into BI - that can fix many issues such as this.
 
I had time to troubleshoot this a little further. I tried reducing the FPS down to 20, tried reducing the bitrate, tried changing resolutions, tried using h.264, tried disabling all but one camera. I tried turning off the HA on that camera. I tried disabling HA globally , no change.

While testing I realized that the error happens no matter which of my 5 cameras has a motion trigger. I thought it was only related to the one camera because there was no other errors in the list. I noticed that the error would automatically delete its event record and move up to the newest motion trigger. I had been installing my T5442T-ZE camera that day so I was getting a lot of motion triggers from this camera at the time when I noticed this error. When I looked in the log I did not see any errors with the other cameras and thought it was only affecting the one camera.


Any ways. Going forward when I tried disabling the hardware Acceleration globally I still get the error. I finally said F it I'm gonna wipe my system of blue iris and start fresh. I uninstalled BI, deleted the 2 C drive folders and deleted the registry entries so that nothing was retained. I re-installed my T5442T-ZE camera and the HW encode error no longer comes up in the logs even at full resolution 30fps maximum bitrate.


I installed 2 more 4k cameras and max them out and everything still working perfect. No HW Encode errors. Looks like it was something in BI causing this
 
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I have been encountering the same issue. BI Support says this:

"Please disable hardware encoding on the camera settings / record / format / recording 0 page. Either it's not compatible or you've exceeded the number of streams it can handle."

I am using direct to disk for everything. I didn't think that the encoder profile where they told me to go was even a factor with D2D.
 
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