4MP using H.265 codec

gilkman

gilkman

Young grasshopper
Sep 18, 2015
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Hey I have Blue Iris and just received a Hik 4MP cam that has the option to use H.265 codec. Does not appear to work when H.265 is selected but H.264 works fine.

The marketing talk says 265 is more efficient but I don't know much more about it.

Any thoughts? Does anyone know if H.265 is worthwhile and if it's on BI's roadmap?
 
Someone else posted that H.265 doesn't work for BI yet.

H.265 should use less disk space for the same quality than H.264, so it's disk space efficiency.

H.265 may use more computing power and electricity than H.264 (as H.264 has plenty of hardware accelerated support), so if that's the case (IF) then it's less power efficient.

Main benefits for people wanting to use H.265 is the lower disk space

Main con is that it's less supported, so make sure you can definitely play it back on the device you want if you ever switch.
 
H.265 would make BI use even more CPU time. I'm sure decoding support will come eventually, but I doubt it will happen until a lot more cameras start encoding it. When this day finally comes, I suspect direct to disk recording will be more important than ever because encoding h.265 is probably going to be a whole lot slower than h.264.
 
gilkman said:
Hey I have Blue Iris and just received a Hik 4MP cam that has the option to use H.265 codec. Does not appear to work when H.265 is selected but H.264 works fine.

The marketing talk says 265 is more efficient but I don't know much more about it.

Any thoughts? Does anyone know if H.265 is worthwhile and if it's on BI's roadmap?
Click to expand...


gilkman,

Which HIKVISION 4MP camera do you have?
 
I can't imagine H.265 is that much better than h.264 when it comes to compression and disk space is cheap. With respect to maturity, robustness, stay with 264.
 
Thanks for all of your inputs folks. Looks like for me the best approach is to stick with h.264
 
H.265 is superior to H.264 is most every way.

In my tests with latest 4 MP Dahua camera that support both H.265 and older H.264 variants, H.265 beats it hands down. Here's what I see:

Encoder / CPU Usage / Idle Bandwidth / High-motion/Peak Bandwidth

H.265 / 25% / 3.1 Mbps / 5.1 Mbps

H.264 / 23% / 7 Mbps / 10 Mbps

This is at 2560 x 1440 and 25 frames per second.

Based upon this simple but effective test on current version of Blue Iris 4, which support H.265, I'll gladly pay the additional 2% CPU overhead for the 50%+ reduction in network bandwidth per camera.

This test was performed under Windows 7 on an Intel i7-5820/3.3 Ghz (6 cores, 12 hyperthreads), so I have the available CPU to spare.

According to this article, H.265 should also provide better image clarity - something I cannot confirm for certain.

Those are the facts in January, 2017.
 
23/25% are really high numbers if you're only running one camera with that CPU. Make sure you're using direct to disk recording, otherwise Blue Iris is actually going to be re-encoding, probably to h264 and a much lower bit rate.

I'd also say to use hardware acceleration but your CPU doesn't support it since you got one without a built-in GPU, and h.265 acceleration isn't supported in BI yet anyway.
 
Good suggestions.

Yeah, I just looked and my baseline CPU usage is around 10% without BI running, so looks like BI is using around 13%/15% of the CPU in the test mentioned above.

Will have a look at the direct to disk recording. Last time I did that, I lost the BI timestamps, but could configure the camera with a time overlay to compensate.

Thanks.
 
Yup. When using on-camera timestamps, you usually have to set daylight savings time rules manually (if you use DST in your area), and it can help to have a local time server to point the camera at. NetTime - Network Time Synchronization Tool

It is absolutely worth the extra setup effort, because your video recordings won't have to be recompressed and this saves CPU time and energy and preserves the best possible quality.
 
I believe you can export them w/timestamps manually but they wont be recorded w/em embedded.
 
Yes, I think if you record to .bvr format, then the export operation can add timestamps to the exported clips. But in doing so, you are re-encoding the video which is expensive and slow and lossy. Re-encoding is not normally necessary during an export, so they go relatively quickly.
 
Just tried disk to disk recording. Unfortunately with H.265, BI crashes when attempting to perform direct-to-disk recording.

Too bad, because H.264 direct to disk looks like it's around 5 times more space efficient than re-encoding at 100% for highest clarity like I'm doing now. Presumably native H.265 would be 10 to 20 times more efficient.

This has been reported as a bug to BI.
 
Last edited:
I can now confirm that this issue has been fixed in latest software update 4.4.9.10!

Very impressed by how quickly Blue Iris Support responded with the fix.

Enjoy the H.265 direct to disk support. I haven't performed an exhaustive comparison test with H.264, but on the surface it appears to be 2 x more efficient based upon a simple comparison test.
 
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Thats good to hear. I also had the crash problem trying to use H265 while using Direct to Disc. I ignore updates usually until there is a problem because Ive had updates CAUSE problems. I look forward to seeing how it goes later. I concur, BI is usually quick to resolve issues with their software. Im very happy with what it does. Pretty awesome work.

EDIT: Welp, updated to 4.5.0.0 and set my cam to H265 and now half of the image is green. Guess there are still issues. Canera is a Dahua 5231 Starlight. Also, Blue Iris still doesn't have the camera listed. Used the find/inspect tool in Blue Iris also and it completely loses the signal.
 
Last edited:
RangerRick said:
I can now confirm that this issue has been fixed in latest software update 4.4.9.10!

Very impressed by how quickly Blue Iris Support responded with the fix.

Enjoy the H.265 direct to disk support. I haven't performed an exhaustive comparison test with H.264, but on the surface it appears to be 2 x more efficient based upon a simple comparison test.
Click to expand...

So does that mean you're seeing a 2x drop in CPU usage? Less network bandwidth?
 
it means its using half as much storage space in h265 vs h264
 
rcirz said:
Thats good to hear. I also had the crash problem trying to use H265 while using Direct to Disc. I ignore updates usually until there is a problem because Ive had updates CAUSE problems. I look forward to seeing how it goes later. I concur, BI is usually quick to resolve issues with their software. Im very happy with what it does. Pretty awesome work.

EDIT: Welp, updated to 4.5.0.0 and set my cam to H265 and now half of the image is green. Guess there are still issues. Canera is a Dahua 5231 Starlight. Also, Blue Iris still doesn't have the camera listed. Used the find/inspect tool in Blue Iris also and it completely loses the signal.
Click to expand...

I get the same 1/2 green screen when trying H.265 on my cameras. They are also Dahua 5231 Starlights...not sure if that matters.
The Dahua web GUI shows as normal...BI screen and recording shows 2/3 green and then sporadically drops the signal and reconnects. (I'm on the latest BI ver but same issue the last few versions.)

I will say, maybe if there is also a BI setting I am supposed to change for this, I don't know about it. I found no reference to "H.265" in the help file search.

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