H.265 or H.264

Mathew

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Should I use H.265 or H.264 My understanding is H.265 has better compression so that should have less bandwidth over the network and smaller file sizes recorded but possibly more CPU usage viewing? I have my cameras set to Limit Decoding unless required and Direct-to-disc when triggered. I rarely monitor cameras at home using the client but do watch one camera with a web browser at work.

Current count of cameras: ten 8mp, two 4mp, four 2mp.
 

fenderman

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Should I use H.265 or H.264 My understanding is H.265 has better compression so that should have less bandwidth over the network and smaller file sizes recorded but possibly more CPU usage viewing? I have my cameras set to Limit Decoding unless required and Direct-to-disc when triggered. I rarely monitor cameras at home using the client but do watch one camera with a web browser at work.

Current count of cameras: ten 8mp, two 4mp, four 2mp.
blue iris cannot hardware accelerate 265 using intel HD. but since your cpu consumption is likely low it should not matter. Note that when using limit decoding you essentially destroy blue iris motion detection capability.
 

fenderman

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Why can't H265 use hardware acceleration with Intel HD? Is this specific to Blue Iris or all H265 decoding? What about Nvidia GTX 10 series?
It's specific to blue Iris and it's foolish to use Nvidia as it's not efficient.
Also note that only sixth gen Intel and up support h265
 

bp2008

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H.265 may produce better image quality at low bit rates, but at higher bit rates the difference in quality will shrink to the point you couldn't say which was better in a side-by-side comparison. H.265 generally requires more CPU time to decode than H.264 does, and this is doubly true if you can use Quick Sync for H.264 decoding hardware acceleration but not for H.265. As far as I know nobody has ever gotten Quick Sync to decode H.265 in Blue Iris. And like fenderman said, Nvidia's decoding is very inefficient and expensive so it should only be used as a last-resort. In many cases even replacing the whole computer with a faster one is a more cost-effective option than buying and running an Nvidia GPU.
 

MrN1ce9uy

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I thought the whole point of H.265 was that it used LESS resources... like half as much.. I'm confused.
 

SouthernYankee

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H.265 intel drive is crap and does not work. That is why BI does not support HA on H.265
 

MrN1ce9uy

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So when my two HDW2231R-ZS cameras get here and I'm setting up BI for the first time; what settings will I want to use with my lowly Pentium G4560? Will my GTX 1060 be of any use?

*Update: Or my G4600 (which has the better HD 530 graphics). I should probably use that instead right? This will be a dedicated BI system. Nothing else running except Windows 10 Pro.
 
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bp2008

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So when my two HDW2231R-ZS cameras get here and I'm setting up BI for the first time; what settings will I want to use with my lowly Pentium G4560? Will my GTX 1060 be of any use?
Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Your CPU is a lot like an i3-7100 so it should be more than capable. You can take the GTX 1060 out of the machine to save power.
 

bp2008

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I thought the whole point of H.265 was that it used LESS resources... like half as much.. I'm confused.
H.265 simply improves compression ratios at the cost of higher CPU utilization to encode and decode. H.264 is still more widely-supported.
 

MrN1ce9uy

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H.265 simply improves compression ratios at the cost of higher CPU utilization to encode and decode. H.264 is still more widely-supported.
Okay now it makes sense. Higher CPU usage for better compression to save transfer bandwidth.

Which doesn't help anything if I'm using local network. Unless i wanted to save disk space right?
 
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m_listed

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Is H265 hardware accelerated decoding working in BI 5? I think it’s been over a year since the update that promised the HW acceleration support came out, hoping it’ll finally actually work in version 5.
 

mech

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As far as I know nobody has ever gotten Quick Sync to decode H.265 in Blue Iris. And like fenderman said, Nvidia's decoding is very inefficient and expensive so it should only be used as a last-resort. In many cases even replacing the whole computer with a faster one is a more cost-effective option than buying and running an Nvidia GPU.
I set my Dahua to H265 with Intel encoding and it appears to be working on a 9th-gen CPU. Wikipedia's infos on QuickSync suggests the processors from Skylake onward have hardware capability for it, so maybe that's why it's working in this case: Intel Quick Sync Video - Wikipedia Running BI5 here but that was also the case for me with BI4.
 

Walrus

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@mech
Post a screen shot of task manager showing GPU being used beside the BI task.
 

bp2008

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BI will automatically disable hardware acceleration for specific cams if it determines that HA is failing and preventing the camera from operating normally.

I'll give Quick Sync H.265 decoding a test today but I am not holding my breath.
 

mech

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@mech
Post a screen shot of task manager showing GPU being used beside the BI task.
Here is a combo screenshot. GPU 0 is an nVidia card which is currently doing the high-bitrate cameras.

This is my observation: if I assign Intel acceleration to that camera and try to play back stored footage, 8x is the fastest I can go without it becoming notchy. If I switch to nVida acceleration and try the same thing, it's almost completely fluid at 64x fast-forward and at 128x it looks like the storage is the bottleneck. So I get different actual results when I toggle the acceleration.

Also attached a screenshot of 1x playback load with all cameras at once. I have just enough combined power to handle 1x on all cams simultaneously. I combine coverage of a 10-unit apartment building, a nearby park with lots of bad activity, and LPR.
 

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bp2008

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I just tried Intel hardware acceleration with H.265 again and it was the same result as last time. I get one frame and then the video just freezes until the watchdog timeout restarts the stream, then one frame again.

@mech It looks like you don't even have the Intel graphics adapter (where Quick Sync resides) enabled on your system. BI will be falling back to software decoding on that camera (I know, it would be great if BI actually told you that).
 

m_listed

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I just tried Intel hardware acceleration with H.265 again and it was the same result as last time. I get one frame and then the video just freezes until the watchdog timeout restarts the stream, then one frame again.

@mech It looks like you don't even have the Intel graphics adapter (where Quick Sync resides) enabled on your system. BI will be falling back to software decoding on that camera (I know, it would be great if BI actually told you that).
That’s what I suspected for him too; H265 acceleration confirmed not working here too. BI also fails to detect that HW acceleration is failing, and exhibits the same stop and go behavior you reported.
 
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