3-4second delay on live feeds

[Jamie Rowe]

Hi all,

I have recently started trialling Blue Iris and IP cams for security in my business.

As I sit in the rear office to do paperwork a lot, I Rely on the cameras to see when a customer approaches the Counter to be served. I have tried tweaking the settings in Blue Iris but i can't seem to work out why i have this constant 3-4 second Delay. Is there a way to Remove this delay completely or at least shorten it?

Regards,
Jamie

 

[blake]

What are you computer specs, and are you writing direct to disk?

 

[fenderman]

Also, confirm that whether the latency is coming from blue iris, by logging into the camera directly and see if there is a delay there.
What cameras are you using?

 

[Jamie Rowe]

What are you computer specs, and are you writing direct to disk?

Computer specs:
i5-2300 2.80GHz
8GB Ram
Running Windows server 2008 R2 Enterprise SP1
Main Hard Drive: Samsung SSD 840EVO 120GB
Storage Drive: Toshiba 3GB (can't remember the Model)

As for writing Direct to disk, No this option was disabled, and turning it on didn't appear to change any delay.

There is 0 delay on the camera side, and at the moment I only have the 1 Camera setup (Testing Quality before spending alot of money.)
[h=1]IPS-HS1812L http://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/bkUbefSu
[/h]The quality of this camera has dropped a bit as i have been tweaking the focus ect, but for AU$108 its not a bad camera.

I will also add, the CPU usage on the server is minimal, seems to sit under 20% usage and RAM seems to peek to about 4Gb max.

Regards, Jamie

 

[Jamie Rowe]

Also, Quick note delay is still there even if i stop recording. Not sure if this can help narrow down the problem or not.

 

[fenderman]

I am sitting here testing out a dahua 2mp and a hikvision 1.3mp getting almost no latency, maybe a few hundred milliseconds...

As an aside, IPS used to have issues with their lenses because they were not using ir corrected lenses (blury ir images, but crisp day images)...this was a few years ago...look at hikvision if you want something more reliable...They also overpowered their led's which led to early burnout and failed to honor their promise to send replacement leds (to me)..

 

[fenderman]

Check your encoder settings record tab> file format >configure

This is from the help file:

The Quality setting when set at 50% is designed to produce visually lossless output. You may increase this value to further refine the output or lower it as necessary to reduce hard drive space used.​

When the encoder is used for streaming, you should enable the Rate control option for Max bitrate. This option will insure that the outbound network bandwidth falls below a specified value in order to provide a smooth streaming experience.​

You may also select a Maximum keyframe interval, also known as the Group of Pictures (GOP). When streaming, using a higher value is acceptable as it raises the quality/bandwidth equation. When recording, however, this value directly affects file seeking (random access) times and efficiency and should be kept relatively low at the expense of using additional storage resources. B-frames offer further advanced compression technology, at the expense of some output latency (delay).​

Under Advanced you may select an encoding Preset. The "faster" presets will use less CPU, while the "slower" presets will produce a higher quality output. ​

Use the Zero frame latency option along with 0 b-frames in order to produce encoder output that is closest to real-time, which may be desirable for streaming. However if you can tolerate some latency, leaving this option un-checked will produce significantly higher quality output.​

 

[bp2008]

As an aside, IPS used to have issues with their lenses because they were not using ir corrected lenses (blury ir images, but crisp day images)...this was a few years ago...look at hikvision if you want something more reliable...They also overpowered their led's which led to early burnout and failed to honor their promise to send replacement leds (to me)..

That was exactly the problems I had with IPS. Bad lenses, and IR LEDs burnt out. I did not have excessive latency though!

Definitely the place to try to solve this is in the camera's encoder settings.

 

[fenderman]

lol, yeah...back then they had good pricing i got the 914v with built in memory and 2mp...One thing i liked was that its 1600x1200 which was beneficial in the area i was using it in..
Fortunately i dont need great night vision in that area, and i get IR, from a camera at the other end of the room.... I would not recommend them at all though..

 

[bp2008]

Yup, I got mine from megaipcam thru amazon. It was I think $150-180 or so for 2MP and that was good back then. Of course at the time you could also get 5mp from aliexpress for a similar price, and those were glitchy but still a great picture and still in use today.

 

[Jamie Rowe]

Check your encoder settings record tab> file format >configure

This is from the help file:

The Quality setting when set at 50% is designed to produce visually lossless output. You may increase this value to further refine the output or lower it as necessary to reduce hard drive space used.
When the encoder is used for streaming, you should enable the Rate control option for Max bitrate. This option will insure that the outbound network bandwidth falls below a specified value in order to provide a smooth streaming experience.

You may also select a Maximum keyframe interval, also known as the Group of Pictures (GOP). When streaming, using a higher value is acceptable as it raises the quality/bandwidth equation. When recording, however, this value directly affects file seeking (random access) times and efficiency and should be kept relatively low at the expense of using additional storage resources. B-frames offer further advanced compression technology, at the expense of some output latency (delay).
Under Advanced you may select an encoding Preset. The "faster" presets will use less CPU, while the "slower" presets will produce a higher quality output.
Use the Zero frame latency option along with 0 b-frames in order to produce encoder output that is closest to real-time, which may be desirable for streaming. However if you can tolerate some latency, leaving this option un-checked will produce significantly higher quality output.​

I tried exactly what you said and still couldn't get it to change, I then realized my camera was running a crappy frame rate of only 4.5fps... after deleting and re-adding the camera multiple times, I realized It wouldn't change. I logged into the camera Directly, and changed the GOP and on the camera, as well as increasing the frame rate on all profiles (Mobile, Mainstream ect.) After doing this, I was able to get 20fps on my camera but still had delay of around 4seconds.

I deleted the camera from Blue Iris and Re-added it once more (making sure i started with defaults) and did as you mentioned in your post, as well as setting the camera to 30fps (Max fps). I then continued to Adjust the Stream settings in Blue Iris, untill the delay was less than a second. I used the Java viewer and over rode the Quality settings also and that seemed to help just a little more.

So It seems i have sort of fixed the issue, Except... It seems if I have two live views open it delays again. So if I'm in the office watching over staff on the camera's and the staff open up the cameras to check a suspicious customer, both streams are then delayed by around 5 seconds again. :\

I'm not complaining though. As long as i have a constantly quick live updating system when I'm here by my self that's all i need.

I hope the Information given here can help someone else debunk their issues and stop them scratching their head

Cheers for all the feed back and help,
Jamie

 

[fenderman]

To clarify, are you having these delays over the webserver? or live viewing on a monitor connected to a blue iris pc?
There are adjustments in the webserver that may be causing the delay...
Also, depending on you setup, wants and needs, you can get an hdmi over ethernet splitter and feed the live image from the blue iris pc to an extra monitor in each room so that you never miss anything..

 

[bp2008]

Are you by chance using WiFi anywhere? That could cause delays, though it would be more likely to cause a ton of dropped frames or complete camera disconnects instead.

 

[Jamie Rowe]

The delay was present on both Blue Iris Server and on any Live view on different computers. There is WiFi on the network, but it is not used except for Wireless printers and 1 laptop. The camera Is Wired and running POE through a 10/100/1000 Switch.

 

[Sabot]

I am scratching my head... My lag is around 20+ seconds. I am trying to understand how I can get live feed on the camera wall. I am using a remote workstation that is one the LAN. I don't know what i am really looking for in the manual which makes it a little tough. I am writing to Disk.

System Spec:
Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 70A4001LUX

Xeon E3-1225 v3
8GB ECC Memory
Windows 8.1 Pro
All drivers are up to date

Cameras:
2 each: Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I
2 each: Dahua IPC-HFW4300S

 

[fenderman]

post a screen shot of your webserver>configure>encoder options

 

[Sabot]

Here you go:

 

[fenderman]

increase the bitrate to 4096 and see if that helps..512 is very low anyways and you are most likely getting a poor image.

 

[Sabot]

I am new to this, so any image is good in my eyes! Moved up the bitrate. Running a 20 seconds delay on the client. The Server is real time.

Here is a screen shot of the four cameras. The Hik's are on the top and the Dahau's are on the bottom.

 

[fenderman]

Try playing with the advanced preset speeds.