No video display when run as service

[ratbuddy]

Howdy, I'm running Blue Iris on a Windows Server 2016 (desktop experience) VM. Everything works fine when I run as non-service, and everything works OK when running under the regular service account, other than NAS access. I created a non-privileged user for Blue Iris, and have the service startup as that user. I also gave that user access to my NAS, so recording works fine.

The only glitch is, when I run the Blue Iris console, I can't see the preview/live feed video pane. It just shows transparent - you can see the desktop (or whatever program is running in that part of the screen) instead of the video feed. Recordings are working fine.

In the example screenshot, you can see the Blue Iris admin desktop shortcut and the services.msc panel showing in place of the expected video. Another oddity is that it prompts for admin password when running the BI program, even though I have that option unchecked in settings.



My end goal is to have this all run as non-privileged service account, and I'm very close, but for this one last little issue.

Help?

 

[fenderman]

Why are you going through all this trouble... Blue Iris needs a privileged account.... Also side note you can change the event color for each camera so they appear independently in the timeline

 

[ratbuddy]

I'm just trying to follow best practices, running everything at the lowest privileges necessary for it to work. Does Blue Iris really require admin? I could swear I read somewhere here that it needs to run under an account other than Local System in order to access network shares, and in practice, BI was unable to access my NAS while running under that account. I made a new account for it in order to allow access to the shares, and now the preview pane stopped working. I guess if you call that 'going to trouble' then I hope I've clearly explained why. Any ideas for fixing it?

Thanks

edit: I changed the Blue Iris service account to 'administrator' type, and now the preview pane works, but I don't like this solution - I was planning on exposing the web interface outside my firewall, but if it must run as admin, I won't be doing that. I'll continue to access BI through VPN instead, for now.

 

[fenderman]

I'm just trying to follow best practices, running everything at the lowest privileges necessary for it to work. Does Blue Iris really require admin? I could swear I read somewhere here that it needs to run under an account other than Local System in order to access network shares, and in practice, BI was unable to access my NAS while running under that account. I made a new account for it in order to allow access to the shares, and now the preview pane stopped working. I guess if you call that 'going to trouble' then I hope I've clearly explained why. Any ideas for fixing it?

Thanks

edit: I changed the Blue Iris service account to 'administrator' type, and now the preview pane works, but I don't like this solution - I was planning on exposing the web interface outside my firewall, but if it must run as admin, I won't be doing that. I'll continue to access BI through VPN instead, for now.

Best practice is to use vpn...

 

[tasiv]

ratbuddy were you ever able to get this resolved? I have the exact same problem where the video window is transparent only when running as a service. If I start the program (startup folder or manually) no issues.

 

[fenderman]

ratbuddy were you ever able to get this resolved? I have the exact same problem where the video window is transparent only when running as a service. If I start the program (startup folder or manually) no issues.

are you running windows as admin? Side note, as mentioned earlier you can change the event colors for cameras so they appear independently in the timeline.

 

[tasiv]

fenderman: Thanks. If I could read this would have been figured out much sooner. I'm with ratbuddy, don't really care for running it as Administrator, but I guess it'll have to do. I could always spin up another VM to handle this stuff.

Thanks for your help.

 

[fenderman]

fenderman: Thanks. If I could read this would have been figured out much sooner. I'm with ratbuddy, don't really care for running it as Administrator, but I guess it'll have to do. I could always spin up another VM to handle this stuff.

Thanks for your help.

there is zero risk in running as admin...absolutely no benefit running as a standard user, literally none.
A vm is not suitable for BI if you also want to run hardware acceleration with intel hd w/quicksync.
You can email support and report the issue.

 

[ratbuddy]

For now tasiv, I'm just running as admin still. I will report the issue, but for now, admin will have to do.

Fenderman, running services as a reduced privilege user (when possible) is security 101. Think about apache, there is a reason it uses a special www-data user instead of just running as root. If the service is compromised, you don't necessarily lose the whole system unless the attacker uses a privilege escalation attack as well. It's not perfect, but every layer helps when securing a system.

BI runs in a VM on my Ryzen proxmox host. It's got 8 virtual cores allocated and the Server 2016 VM guest runs around ~3% CPU with two cameras recording direct to disk. I'm planning six more 3-6mp cameras, and if that brings CPU use to 25%, no big deal, that's still only a single real CPU core out of eight available. The VM host currently sits around 3.5% CPU utilization overall, with the BI Windows Server, a FreeNAS guest, and two Ubuntu servers running. While I'm sure quick sync helps lower end systems run BI more efficiently, the CPU utilization numbers I'm seeing are just fine. Not gonna run out of horsepower any time soon, and it's a 65w CPU. Show me an eight core/65 watt Intel chip for $300 and I'll consider it. Till then, my gaming rigs run Intel, and my server will run Ryzen

 

[fenderman]

Fenderman, running services as a reduced privilege user (when possible) is security 101.

This makes no sense on a vms machines that should be running on its own os and box...you will find out soon enough that this is important for a vms and bi.
They ryzen is inefficient compared to the intel..you dont state what cameras you are currently running and frame rates...once you get to higher MP/frame rates your system will choke.
You can buy an entire i7-6700 system for 450 or so....i7-7700 for 570....not just the processor....amd lags far behind intel.

 

[ratbuddy]

"AMD lags far behind Intel" is no longer true. See UserBenchmark: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 vs Intel Core i7-6700 - the Ryzen is the same price, but has much better multithreaded performance. For a VM host machine, that's huge. I appreciate that you're an Intel fan, but it's not the right choice for every application any more - that changed with Ryzen.

 

[fenderman]

"AMD lags far behind Intel" is no longer true. See UserBenchmark: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 vs Intel Core i7-6700 - the Ryzen is the same price, but has much better multithreaded performance. For a VM host machine, that's huge. I appreciate that you're an Intel fan, but it's not the right choice for every application any more - that changed with Ryzen.

It lags for two reasons, power consumption (remember you need to add graphics as well)which is HUGE on a 24/7 machine and price...its actually more expensive to buy, why? because we can buy cheap intel machines ..so you pay more for the amd..makes no sense..blue iris and any vms should run on its own hardware. Youll see soon enough...lots of folks talk big when they have one or two cams...this is experience talking...

 

[ratbuddy]

blue iris and any vms should run on its own hardware

Sorry, if you're suggesting that I run Blue Iris in a bare-metal OS installation, that's never going to happen. Virtualization simply offers too many advantages - it really is revolutionary technology. The 'Blue Iris and any vms' phrasing is a little confusing, I apologize if you weren't actually suggesting I run BI on a bare-metal installation.

I do appreciate your past experience, but I think you should try a Ryzen system before you shoot it down.

edit: My server has this video card, GeForce GTX 750 Ti Power Consumption - Tom's Hardware with no monitors connected. Six watts. Keeping in mind that the Intel 6700 and the Ryzen 1700 both have a 65 watt TDP, but the Ryzen has double the core count, I think an extra six watts for a video card is fine.

 

[fenderman]

Sorry, if you're suggesting that I run Blue Iris in a bare-metal OS installation, that's never going to happen. Virtualization simply offers too many advantages - it really is revolutionary technology. The 'Blue Iris and any vms' phrasing is a little confusing, I apologize if you weren't actually suggesting I run BI on a bare-metal installation.

I do appreciate your past experience, but I think you should try a Ryzen system before you shoot it down.

yes i am...again you will find out soon enough...
Why would I pay more for a power hog...most of my blue iris installations run on hp elitedesks with i5/sandybridge through haswell processors. I pay 300 for the entire system often with ssd included for os/BI. put your machine on a killawatt meter under usual load then youll see...you will also certainly eventually have issues with the vm and BI.

 

[ratbuddy]

Which issues have you seen while running BI in a virtual machine?

I'll check my power consumption when I get home, the server is plugged into a beefy UPS system with watt readout.

edit: 125 watts at the wall, for the server (4 sticks ram, 6 spinners, 1 nvme drive, gtx 750ti) under normal load, an 8 port PoE switch (two ports in use), a high end wireless router, and my cable modem combined. Hardly a power hog.

 

[markcohn28]

I've been wanting to built a Ryzen system to upgrade my i7 4790K. My present system runs Windows 10 Pro and Blue Iris (with 22 cameras) bare metal. I do a lot of video encoding and plan on doing some 4K video so I want to upgrade to more cores. I also have a Windows 2012 R2 server with a Xeon E3-1226 V3 running two Hyper-V VMs (Windows 2016 Server DE & Windows 2003 R2). I have transferred my 22 cameras to my Windows 2016 Server DE to test it and it worked fine. I'm looking to build a Ryzen Threaddripper 1920X workstation that can handle Blue Iris and all of the video stuff I do. I emailed Blue Iris support about using Ryzen processors and AMD Open Advanced Media Framework (AMF) . Here's Blue Iris Support response:
"I have built-in code for Intel HWVA... please see ark.intel.com to compare relative performance for QuickSync and other relevant features. There are no plans (or time!) to expand this to AMD I do apologize.

The software is highly multithreaded, so it could come down to 1 core used per camera just for decoding ... along with everything else it's doing.

The QuickSync is used for H.264 decoding. If you have H.264 cameras, you will benefit. There's a limit though, this helps with about 12 720p cameras ... after that, it might slow things down. But you can select which cameras it's used for. With that 12 camera test, it drops the CPU by about 50%."

So Fenderman is not exactly correct. I think having more real cores will benefit more if you have more than 12 cameras and I plan on going to 30 cameras.

 

[fenderman]

I've been wanting to built a Ryzen system to upgrade my i7 4790K. My present system runs Windows 10 Pro and Blue Iris (with 22 cameras) bare metal. I do a lot of video encoding and plan on doing some 4K video so I want to upgrade to more cores. I also have a Windows 2012 R2 server with a Xeon E3-1226 V3 running two Hyper-V VMs (Windows 2016 Server DE & Windows 2003 R2). I have transferred my 22 cameras to my Windows 2016 Server DE to test it and it worked fine. I'm looking to build a Ryzen Threaddripper 1920X workstation that can handle Blue Iris and all of the video stuff I do. I emailed Blue Iris support about using Ryzen processors and AMD Open Advanced Media Framework (AMF) . Here's Blue Iris Support response:
"I have built-in code for Intel HWVA... please see ark.intel.com to compare relative performance for QuickSync and other relevant features. There are no plans (or time!) to expand this to AMD I do apologize.

The software is highly multithreaded, so it could come down to 1 core used per camera just for decoding ... along with everything else it's doing.

The QuickSync is used for H.264 decoding. If you have H.264 cameras, you will benefit. There's a limit though, this helps with about 12 720p cameras ... after that, it might slow things down. But you can select which cameras it's used for. With that 12 camera test, it drops the CPU by about 50%."

So Fenderman is not exactly correct. I think having more real cores will benefit more if you have more than 12 cameras and I plan on going to 30 cameras.

Actually I am 100 percent correct... and honestly dont know where the developer is getting this nonsense about slowing things down after 12 720p cameras...myself and many other users have systems with way more cams/higher res than that and see a significant drip in cpu consumption (at least 30 percent) using HA....Ken is flat out wrong - just read the threads....and yes at this time blue iris only supports h.264 hardware decoding however skylake and newer processors support h.265 hardware acceleration...its highly likely that he will add that...
I dont understand why you would use a VMS machine for other purposes...if you want a stable system it should be dedicated to VMS, nothing else...ryzen along with the video card it requires will be a powerhog compared to intel systems.

 

[markcohn28]

Actually I am 100 percent correct... and honestly dont know where the developer is getting this nonsense about slowing things down after 12 720p cameras...myself and many other users have systems with way more cams/higher res than that and see a significant drip in cpu consumption (at least 30 percent) using HA....Ken is flat out wrong - just read the threads....and yes at this time blue iris only supports h.264 hardware decoding however skylake and newer processors support h.265 hardware acceleration...its highly likely that he will add that...
I dont understand why you would use a VMS machine for other purposes...if you want a stable system it should be dedicated to VMS, nothing else...ryzen along with the video card it requires will be a powerhog compared to intel systems.

Which do I use for the QuickSync H.264 decoding - Yes -no VPP or Yes + VPP? What do I use for the 13-22 cameras that should not use QuickSync - No?

 

[fenderman]

Which do I use for the QuickSync H.264 decoding - Yes -no VPP or Yes + VPP? What do I use for the 13-22 cameras that should not use QuickSync - No?

Dont use vpp...this is explained in the release notes...its only for a few cameras/low total bitrate...
Test it yourself, I would set all cameras to HA...then test with only half, see for yourself...

 

[markcohn28]

My i7 4790K with 32 GB of RAM, Windows 10 Pro, Boot OS - SSD, Clip Storage on a PCIe M.2 SSD runs at between 35-40% CPU utilization. But when I open the Blue Iris console , it shoots up to the high 90's. What can I do to lower it when the console is running?