Adding 8mp camera into BI... Camera settings?

[Tolting Colt Acres]

I picked up a 8mp turret for testing. No matter what combination of settings I use for the video stream, I cannot get the camera up to 20fps (on a street w/ vehicles travelling at a high rate of speed.) Bitrate always remains 0. Running version 4.5.9.2.

Any thoughts? I've tried various combinations of video quality, bitrate, H.264 and 5, etc. Would prefer to keep the frame rate high on this camera, since vehicles routinely travel >50mph through this intersection (police traffic law enforcement is non-existent in my town despite repeated video evidence proving the level of lawlessness which exists on the streets). Local PD routinely asks me for video from this intersection at least once a month (so you'd think as a return favor they would at least increase enforcement...)

 

[looney2ns]

What specific cam?

Does 20fps occur with the cams viewer?

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

DS-2CD2385FWD-I. Yes, as best as I can tell, motion is quite fluid in the native viewer (but there's no indication as to the actual fps on the display)

 

[bp2008]

My suggestion is Constant bit rate, H264, disable H.264+ (or H.265+), disable SVC (scalable video codec) if the camera has it. Profile can likely be anything but High Profile is probably the best quality. In Blue Iris if it still does not work well try toggling hardware acceleration on or off.

What CPU do you have and what % it is running at?

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

Constant, H264 (disable + and SVC) gets me to 20fps @ ~200kB/s w/ a max bitrate of 1024. Increasing the max bitrate, 2048, 3072, 4096, will yield a drop in fps and an increase in bitrate kB/s (4096 will get me ~6-8fps @ 480kB/s).

Any type of motion on the camera drops the fps in BI significantly. As I lower the max bitrate settings in the config w/ constant, I get increasingly choppy video and more artifacting in the native viewer.

Switching between main and high profile (only two options I have) doesn't seem to make an appreciable difference, although I haven't reviewed video footage from each yet either.

My CPU utilization averages 45%. Dual X5675 R710 PowerEdge, no Quicksync, direct-to-disk.

I mainly use BI for my video wall (via discrete NVidia card to a 4K monitor) via the web interface. Each of my cameras records directly to its own 1TB SMB share on the R710.

Overall, things have been working great. I added the 8MP as an experiment, more or less (my first turret, everything else is a bullet).

 

[bp2008]

Hmm. Running the latest version of Blue Iris?

My only 8MP camera is a Dahua which I run at 10 FPS and have no trouble with.

If you were to temporarily disable some of the 4MP cameras, does it make the 8MP camera perform better?

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

The 8.3 replaced a 4.1 bullet which was running 20fps @ 480-500kB/s (CPU utilization was about the same, more or less)

If I disable 4 of the other 4.1 bullets (running @ 10fps), @ 4096 max bitrate I can get 20fps @ ~500kB/sec, 20% CPU utilization. Each one I add in drops me down ~3-4fps and increases my cpu utilization by 4-5%.

 

[bp2008]

Ok, I see two likely possibilities then.

1) Blue Iris maybe can't utilize dual CPUs? Though I think this is unlikely.
2) Your load is around 620 MP/s (megapixels per second) which is pretty large. I suspect there is another bottleneck besides CPU power, maybe memory bandwidth, that begins affecting BI performance around 600-700 MP/s on many systems. I've seen more than one heavy load like this that can't maintain the expected frame rates.

The surprising thing in your case is that only one camera is suffering reduced frame rates. I would have expected multiple cams to start dropping frames, as I have seen before.

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

I do not think it is #1. Although I have never seen BI's source code, I assume it uses a threaded model. Overall my CPU utilization hasn't been horrible, thanks to some useful feedback from Fenderman and others on how to configure my cameras. I'm actually pretty happy overall, but then, I do not use the BI GUI to view my video wall, I use the web interface, and my cameras stream to their own storage shares. In this respect I'm not using BI anywhere near its full potential, but, I figure I have 14 ARM7 processors sitting around at 10% load, I might as well use them for something.

I do have the hyperthreading enabled, so the system appears to have 24 cores. I could try disabling hyperthreading. I know some threaded code has issues with hyperthreading where it will perform worse.

Another thing I could do this evening is I could disable the 8.3mp and put 2 4.1mp cameras online @ 20fps, which would give me the same MP load, and see if I experience similar symptoms. That would give us an indication if it were #2, or something inherit in the 8mp. I wasn't sure how well BI handles 8MP cameras.

Supporting your #2 theory is I definitely see an across-the-board fps drop on the 20fps cameras when I re-enable the other 4 cameras. The 4s seem to drop to ~15fps.

I bought the 8 to try it out for possible installation at my mother in law's beachhouse (not a BI system, the cameras I need for that install will have their own internal SDcard storage). Ultimately I'll be swapping it back out with my original 4.

 

[fenderman]

@Tolting Colt Acres
Have you tried disabling all other cams and just testing the 8mp?

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

No... I can try tomorrow (not going to be able to fiddle with this today, have work-related issues to address which are consuming my time), but disabling the 4 4mp's did get the 8mp up to 20fps, so it would seem to support BP's #2 theory.

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

Okay, I did a little fiddling today.

Step one: Disabled the 8mp camera. Added in 2 4mp cameras @ 10fps each. BI keeps up with the load, CPU utilization still around 40-50%:



Step two: Disabled one of the test 4MPs, and changed the other (Test1) to 20fps. Everything keeps up just fine:



Step 3: Re-Enable the 2nd 4MP @ 20fps. At this point, the 20fps cameras (street group & test cameras) start to drop frames:



So, this seems to support BP's assertion that the BI is starting to bottleneck.


Fenderman, to answer your question, if I disable all the other cameras and just run the 8mp... No problems, it keeps up:



This has been an interesting experiment... I conclude that if I were to return to my pre-8mp configuration, everything would continue to work fine... but I would not be able to add even another 4mp camera, even at 10fps, without starting to bottleneck.