Help diagnosing stretched/squished playback of wide cameras.

MBru

MBru

n3wb
Jul 10, 2025
3
0
Michigan
I have been dealing with this for awhile and my install of BI is really old so I have gone through many version changes and camera models so I don't know if this is being caused by some old setting somewhere but after much searching and checking settings I have finally given up and am reaching out. But my Reolink Duo2 cameras display perfectly for live video but when using Timeline and going back to review old footage I will using the mouse wheel to zoom but for some reason the webUI will stretch and squeeze the playback to a distorted view. Its like its trying to make the video square no matter what.

Timeline no zoom
Screenshot 2025-07-10 115711.png


Timeline + 1 level mouse scroll zoom
Screenshot 2025-07-10 115744.png
 
Here are a few things:

1. Try a different web browser to see if behavior is different.
2. Enable UI3 camera labels (also enable for single-camera streams) so you can see where UI3 thinks the camera video is supposed to be rendering:
1752169486494.png

If the width of the label background does not match the camera video, that indicates UI3 is having a scaling problem.

3. In UI3's settings, try all the different H.264 Player options (requires page reload to take effect).
4. Right click this camera in UI3, go to Camera Properties, and see what it says the video resolution is. If you have a sub stream configured, it will also show that resolution. Make sure these resolutions match what is configured.
5. Right click the video in UI3 and open "Stats for nerds". It shows some information about the stream resolution.
 
Screenshot 2025-07-10 141112.pngScreenshot 2025-07-10 141159.pngScreenshot 2025-07-10 141805.pngScreenshot 2025-07-10 140926.pngScreenshot 2025-07-10 141037.png


Looks like its a rendering issue or its requesting the wrong resolution in stats for nerds. The label is not lining up with the camera. According to BI camera properties its set for the correct resolution, I even tried to force anamorphic and it was no change. Its actually doing this on all the camera now, including the square ones like the Reolink PoE doorbell. Screenshot 2025-07-10 142329.png

Is there a way to force a reinstall of UI3 back to defaults or original working files, without having to reinstall BI?
 
Based on Stats for nerds screenshot, UI3 is requesting a 3840 x 1440 stream, which is the correct aspect ratio, scaled down a little to fit the "4K" 2160p streaming profile. That much is working as intended. But Blue Iris is sending 3840x720 which is definitely wrong and is likely the cause of the issue. The question is WHY is Blue Iris doing that?

I see you have Nvidia hardware accelerated decoding enabled there in Blue Iris for that camera. Try it with that turned off.

Every time you install a BI patch, it overwrites your UI3 installation. But based on these symptoms I have no reason to believe UI3 files are corrupted. I think it is most likely something going wrong in Blue Iris causing it to not encode the appropriate resolution.
 
bp2008 said:
Based on Stats for nerds screenshot, UI3 is requesting a 3840 x 1440 stream, which is the correct aspect ratio, scaled down a little to fit the "4K" 2160p streaming profile. That much is working as intended. But Blue Iris is sending 3840x720 which is definitely wrong and is likely the cause of the issue. The question is WHY is Blue Iris doing that?

I see you have Nvidia hardware accelerated decoding enabled there in Blue Iris for that camera. Try it with that turned off.

Every time you install a BI patch, it overwrites your UI3 installation. But based on these symptoms I have no reason to believe UI3 files are corrupted. I think it is most likely something going wrong in Blue Iris causing it to not encode the appropriate resolution.
Click to expand...
The GPU setting made no difference. I have tried changing settings in the streaming profiles, turning on resize or retain aspect ratio, turning off and on the GPU settings. I just cant seem to find anything that effects the recorded videos. Live view works perfectly.

Screenshot 2025-07-10 145556.png
 
Nvidia encoding in the encoder options could also introduce compatibility problems. I'd run with that turned off. Actually I would recommend resetting the encoder options to defaults. Direct-to-wire in particular can cause issues with UI3 because it doesn't let Blue Iris transcode the video to match the streaming profile chosen in UI3.
 
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