UI3 Video Playback painfully slow / Live is fine

exomic

exomic

Young grasshopper
Apr 13, 2020
31
5
Canada
Hello,

I'm having an issue when I try to playback some video that I flagged. The FPS is around 1-3FPS and the audio buffer (cut on and off). In live mode everything is smooth and at the camera 15fps steady but strangely the playback aren't. CPU Usage is around 15%, ram 45% and GPU 5% so it doesn't seems to be a performance issue. I'm using my computer with 1 gigabit ethernet cable to the blueiris server so not a problem here. I run v5.7.9.0 and I don't know when this issue started to occur. If i download the recording in mp4 it plays perfectly.

Any tips or is it a known issue that will be fixed?

Thanks for the help!
 
Step 1. Disable auto update - leave it off always. Step 2 revert back to the last known stable version and test again.
 
In UI3, whilst playing back the recording - right click > Stats for nerds and see what delays you are getting. Can then have a better idea of if it's network or hardware/software.

Good idea to check on a different device, logged into the same BI account and see if you are still getting low fps in UI3.

I'd also make sure Hardware Acceleration is turned off for clip playback and check your encoder settings (Settings > Web Server > Advanced > Configure > HVA).

Lastly, check streaming profile settings in your UI3 settings that might be overriding the BI config.
 
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In UI3, clip playback is basically identical to a live stream (it all uses the same code), so the performance problem is most likely on Blue Iris's end. If you are recording to mp4 format, that can be an issue sometimes if you don't have the right codecs installed on the Blue Iris machine (I have no idea why it matters, Blue Iris should bundle its own damn mp4 codecs). bvr format is usually better.
 
hikky_b said:
In UI3, whilst playing back the recording - right click > Stats for nerds and see what delays you are getting. Can then have a better idea of if it's network or hardware/software.

Good idea to check on a different device, logged into the same BI account and see if you are still getting low fps in UI3.

I'd also make sure Hardware Acceleration is turned off for clip playback and check your encoder settings (Settings > Web Server > Advanced > Configure > HVA).

Lastly, check streaming profile settings in your UI3 settings that might be overriding the BI config.
Click to expand...
Hello, I just did that and I compared the Live stream stats with the recording stats and here's what I have.

This is the live stream (no issue here).
live.png

This is the recoding stats (Lagging allot)
recording.png

bp2008 said:
If you are recording to mp4 format, that can be an issue sometimes if you don't have the right codecs installed on the Blue Iris machine
Click to expand...
I'm recording direct to disk in the bvr format as recommanded. What I did tried to see if the issue was the stream or the recorded files was to export the file in mp4 and them played them on my pc and there's no lag at all so the issue seems to be the stream performance for recorded clips only as live stream is fine.

Thanks for the help guys! Hopefully we find the solution.

UPDATE: I tried in the BlueIris interface directly and the recording is lagging as well.
 
Last edited:
If I am interpreting your graphs correctly, that means Blue Iris is dropping frames during clip playback. If Blue Iris was actually encoding frames at the correct rate and they were getting played too slow, then one of the delay graphs would be rising out of control.

Also it appears you have set the keyframe interval for web server streams to a low number, probably around 30 in an attempt to follow established guidelines to have the i-frame interval be 1-2x the frame rate. However this advice does not actually apply to Blue Iris web server streaming. In this particular case, extra keyframes do no good, so for efficiency's sake you want the keyframe interval to be as high as possible without causing streaming problems. I recommend setting it to 1000. You probably changed this in Blue Iris's encoder settings (the place described by @hikky_b ).

1691766827329.png

This page of UI3 Help has a "H.264 Profile Configuration Tips" section with advice for each of the H.264 encoding settings. It is slightly out of date now as the keyframe limit was recently raised from 300 to 1000 in Blue Iris's local console, but otherwise is still good advice.
 
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bp2008 said:
If I am interpreting your graphs correctly, that means Blue Iris is dropping frames during clip playback. If Blue Iris was actually encoding frames at the correct rate and they were getting played too slow, then one of the delay graphs would be rising out of control.

Also it appears you have set the keyframe interval for web server streams to a low number, probably around 30 in an attempt to follow established guidelines to have the i-frame interval be 1-2x the frame rate. However this advice does not actually apply to Blue Iris web server streaming. In this particular case, extra keyframes do no good, so for efficiency's sake you want the keyframe interval to be as high as possible without causing streaming problems. I recommend setting it to 1000. You probably changed this in Blue Iris's encoder settings (the place described by @hikky_b ).

View attachment 169834

This page of UI3 Help has a "H.264 Profile Configuration Tips" section with advice for each of the H.264 encoding settings. It is slightly out of date now as the keyframe limit was recently raised from 300 to 1000 in Blue Iris's local console, but otherwise is still good advice.
Click to expand...
Strangely the default value is set to 300 by BlueIris. I changed it to 1000 but the issue persist. Also using streaming profile 0, 1 or 2 always revert to profile 0.
 
Hmm. If your keyframe rate was actually 300 then I am surprised to see such frequent 1-frame spikes in the frame size graph. That is usually indicative of a low keyframe rate. It would not cause any major streaming issues though. Just higher bandwidth usage and lower quality than you'd get with a longer keyframe interval.
 
I just got my alert list to load finally (loading the clip/alert list is SHITTY SLOW on the BI version I'm running) and clips are able to play at 30 FPS.
 
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I'm using the default 2160p vbr profile in the UI3 and here's the encoder options note the UI3 overrides is Yes I suppose the browser then override that...
 

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That is all fine. The "allow UI3 overrides" thing was added by Blue Iris a while back against my advice as a tool to reduce unknown factors when troubleshooting streaming problems. Initially that field was actually defaulted to prevent UI3 from overriding streaming settings, which neutered all the streaming profiles in UI3. :)
 
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