HDW5231R-Z video settings

T

thewolf56

Getting the hang of it
Mar 31, 2017
106
64
AZ
Hello All,

First, I want to thank everyone for all of the knowledge that has been shared on this board. Because of this site, I was able to find a good IP camera to start with and also learned about protecting my network devices while allowing remote access through VPN (now using OPNSense with an OpenVPN server).

I have had a 5231R-Z for some time (setup with mail alerts only) and although the image and snapshots look good live, I have noticed an issue with recorded video (that seems connected to the issue regarding live output as well). With recorded video (recorded to a high quality sd card that hasn't even been written over once), the audio sounds like it is underwater (think of speaking to someone using a VOIP line that hits a bunch of network congestion). I noticed that my output to my cellphone was showing 30 FPS on my main stream even though I had set both streams to only 15 FPS.

I do not see what else I should change to only have the main stream at only 15 FPS. I had just downloaded a trial of blue iris to an old Win 10 PC to try out and with this camera at 30 FPS, the CPU usage was higher than I would be comfortable with (as I am adding another camera that has already been ordered from Andy which would probably peg the CPU on the demo version).

If someone could point out what I am doing wrong here, I would appreciate it. Thanks
 

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Thanks @looney2ns . I haven't verified that changing the noise filter changed the audio issue yet (I haven't received a trigger yet), but it didn't fix the FPS stuck at 30. However, it led me to look at some of the other settings to see why it was stuck at 30 FPS. I changed the smart codec to "On", rebooted, and the camera had switched to 15 FPS. Switched smart codec back to "Off", Bit rate back to VBR, and rebooted, and now the camera shows 15 FPS on my tinycam Pro and Blue Iris. This doesn't make sense as the camera has been rebooted a few times trying to get this working, so something with that settingAlso, Blue Iris has the PC total CPU usage at 30% CPU and before this change my CPU usage was around 77% (both numbers with the console open and only 1 camera).

On the Blue Iris front, I've actually lurked around this forum for quite a while before I ever posted and have learned a lot from the experts here. The PC I am testing BI on is an old PC with an AMD A10-6700 APU, so no quicksync on it. I know you mentioned HA doesn't work on the demo, but I also thought direct2disk did not work either on the demo. Either way, I already have the date and time setup on the camera in anticipation of using direct2disk, but I still need to figure out how to setup a timeserver on my router and have the cameras poll that (as they are blocked from the internet and I do not want to run a timeserver on another PC right now). I mainly wanted to try setting up alerts and other items like that in BI before spending the money on the NVR side of things. With the overall CPU at a suitable level, I can now start testing the software.

I do plan on getting a refurbished Optiplex or elitedesk when they go on sale. I am thinking an i5-8500 will be suitable for all of the places I currently have wired for camera drops, and then some. It will definitely be overkill for what I need at the moment. If it wasn't for this forum, I would never have wanted to try these quality cameras or NVR on a PC. My only previous experience prior to this was a Foscam Indoor PTZ (which is no longer even on my network).

Thanks again

edit: I decided to manually trigger the camera and the audio works great on recordings now. I'll have to bump up the sensitivity on it, but at least it is now usable thanks to your advice.
 
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And there are times when you have done lots of setting changes in the cam, it gets flaky, the best option is to do a factory default from the cam's webgui.
Then set the cam up from scratch.
 
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thewolf56 said:
Thanks @looney2ns . I haven't verified that changing the noise filter changed the audio issue yet (I haven't received a trigger yet), but it didn't fix the FPS stuck at 30. However, it led me to look at some of the other settings to see why it was stuck at 30 FPS. I changed the smart codec to "On", rebooted, and the camera had switched to 15 FPS. Switched smart codec back to "Off", Bit rate back to VBR, and rebooted, and now the camera shows 15 FPS on my tinycam Pro and Blue Iris. This doesn't make sense as the camera has been rebooted a few times trying to get this working, so something with that settingAlso, Blue Iris has the PC total CPU usage at 30% CPU and before this change my CPU usage was around 77% (both numbers with the console open and only 1 camera).

On the Blue Iris front, I've actually lurked around this forum for quite a while before I ever posted and have learned a lot from the experts here. The PC I am testing BI on is an old PC with an AMD A10-6700 APU, so no quicksync on it. I know you mentioned HA doesn't work on the demo, but I also thought direct2disk did not work either on the demo. Either way, I already have the date and time setup on the camera in anticipation of using direct2disk, but I still need to figure out how to setup a timeserver on my router and have the cameras poll that (as they are blocked from the internet and I do not want to run a timeserver on another PC right now). I mainly wanted to try setting up alerts and other items like that in BI before spending the money on the NVR side of things. With the overall CPU at a suitable level, I can now start testing the software.

I do plan on getting a refurbished Optiplex or elitedesk when they go on sale. I am thinking an i5-8500 will be suitable for all of the places I currently have wired for camera drops, and then some. It will definitely be overkill for what I need at the moment. If it wasn't for this forum, I would never have wanted to try these quality cameras or NVR on a PC. My only previous experience prior to this was a Foscam Indoor PTZ (which is no longer even on my network).

Thanks again

edit: I decided to manually trigger the camera and the audio works great on recordings now. I'll have to bump up the sensitivity on it, but at least it is now usable thanks to your advice.
Click to expand...

Also, you can run this on the same PC that runs BI, and point your cameras to it. NetTime - Network Time Synchronization Tool
 
looney2ns said:
Also, you can run this on the same PC that runs BI, and point your cameras to it. NetTime - Network Time Synchronization Tool
Click to expand...

Thanks. I got the idea for syncing to a time server from one of the threads here about that tool. I was just thinking about running it from my router as my router (OPNsense) has the timeserver functionality built in and that way I can sync all of my network to the router.

One bit of bad news though, Even though the camera was outputting 15 FPS, once the IR kicked in, it went back to outputting 30 FPS. I had read on another thread about someone having starlights with a firmware bug that locked his output to 30 FPS. I noticed that the firmware on my camera was quite outdated (and I tend to not update firmware unless needed) and I never really noticed the issue as I only used the substream to view remotely and the FPS worked correctly for that stream. i ended up using the firmware Andy posted here: Latest New 20180813 Firmware for DH_IPC-HX5X3X-Rhea and the output is working even from the transition from night to day.
 
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