Advanced Troubleshooting on my setup - advice needed

maxtoid

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Hi all,

I am having some issues with my new BI setup and would be curious if anyone has any insight. - Here's my situation:

I have a new BI build with 26 cameras. I had BI for 5 years with 20 1080p cameras and it worked fine but since I was going to 2560x1440 I rebuilt it with way higher specs, but it still have issues with lag/freezing in live preview.

Specs:
CPU: Intel i9-9900k
RAM: 32GB DDR4
SSD: Samsung 970 Pro 512GB

Cameras:
  • 14 Amcrest IP5M-T1179E (Dahua IPC-HDW2531TP-AS) flashed to Dahua firmware
    • Firmware Version: V2.800.0000000.16.R, Build Date: 2020-04-18
    • Video Stream Settings:
      • Resolution: 2304x1296
        • (Because Dahua is weird and that's the highest 16x9 stream on a 5MP camera...)
      • CBR
      • FPS: 15
      • Bitrate: 4096
      • I-Frame: 30
    • Audio Stream Settings:
      • AAC 16000
  • 10 Reolink RLC-520
    • Firmware Version: v3.0.0.65_20071012
      • Video Stream Settings:
        • Resolution: 2560x1440
        • I think VBR? Reolink doesn't let you choose CBR vs VBR
        • FPS: 15
        • Bitrate: 3072
        • H.264 Profile: High
  • 1 Foscam PTZ camera and 1 Dahua HFW-4300Sv2
By setting the FPS to 15 and ensuring h.264 on all cameras, and by tweaking BI settings to the settings below, I was able to get my CPU usage down to 15-25%... but my live preview window still lags - I'm assuming because I'm live-previewing 25 cameras... but I tried limiting live preview FPS to 10fps and it still lags.

BI settings:
  • BI Global:
    • Other
      • Scaling: Fast
    • Camera
      • No hardware decoding
      • Limit live preview rate: 10 FPS
  • Camera Specific:
    • Video:
      • Limit Decoding Unless Required:
        • Checked
      • Max Rate:
        • 15 fps
      • Enable Overlays:
        • Unchecked
      • Also BVR:
        • Unchecked
      • Configure Screen:
        • Receive Buffer:
          • Either 4 or 3 MB depending on reolink vs dahua to match camera bitrate
        • Send RTSP keep-alives
          • Checked
        • Use RTSP/stream timecode
          • Checked
        • Skip initial HTTP DNS tests
          • Checked
        • Decoder compatibility mode
          • Unchecked
Overall these settings have performed very well for me. I configured all these settings to fix a actual stream lag that would cause the cameras to slowly lag more and more behind until I rebooted, and so far that's worked great. They all stay in sync perfectly, but they will skip a second or three here and there. I.e. if someone walks through my house, it'll freeze when they are in a camera view for a second and then jump to them halfway across the room.

One thing to note is that I'm not interested in using substreams. I tried that and just am not happy with the performance - Plus I don't think it's a processing speed issue since my RAM now sits at 15-25% and my RAM is only 25% utilized.

From all my troubleshooting, this LOOKS to me like a live preview graphics issue. I'm connecting a 2560x1440p monitor directly to the motherboard and using the intel graphics on the i9-9900k - What I'm wondering is would my situation be resolved by getting a GPU just to power the monitor off of? And if so what GPU would be recommended if I'm just using it for live preview?

Thanks for any insight!
 
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have issues with lag/freezing in live preview
Not sure what you mean by Live Preview. Like using UI3?

If that is the case, then I had problems with having the Webcasting Default max FPS set greater than 5.

Camera
  • No hardware decoding
Why no hardware decoding? You have a great cpu, use the HA.

Set the I frame equal to the Frame Rate (FPS) in the cam.

Make the Receive Buffer bigger. I use 20 for a 4MP cam.

I am using Limit live preview rate = 15FPS.

I have 18 cams continuous recording at 10,200 kB/s and 675 MP/s on an i7-8700. CPU is 17% and RAM is 5GB used out of 32GB. But I mam using HA = Nvidia and have a separate GPU card running at 41%. I am not using substreams.

You have 32GB RAM. Are you using 2x16GB sticks in Dual Channel configuration? That is important.

Make sure you check out the Cliff Notes especially the part about optimizing BI.
 

maxtoid

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Not sure what you mean by Live Preview. Like using UI3?
I mean actually live preview via the BI console - I run BI on a dedicated monitor and just set the view to maximize frame.

You have 32GB RAM. Are you using 2x16GB sticks in Dual Channel configuration? That is important.
I do have that setup, yes.

Make the Receive Buffer bigger. I use 20 for a 4MP cam.
Hmm I missed that in the cliff notes - I'll adjust them all to a higher buffer - thanks

Why no hardware decoding? You have a great cpu, use the HA.
I would love to use hardware decoding, but with any type of hardware decoding, the Dahua cams have a black bar across the bottom that throws the resolution off and screws up my 25-camera view (since 14 of the cameras are a slightly different resolution than 16x9 because of the 1/8th-inch black bar that hardware decoding adds to the bottom of them). Took me forever to figure that out, but it happens with all types of Intel hardware decoding. I emailed Ken about it but he hasn't responded to any of my support emails in several months for some reason.
 

looney2ns

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Do you have a current support plan?
Are you sending the email as per the BI help file?
Make sure you are not using a private domain email, use gmail or the such.
 
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^ What loony stated.

Well I guess until the issue is solved, you have to decide which is less of an issue, 1/8" black bar or lag/freezing in live view. You might try using HA for one cam at a time and see if you can get by w/o black bar and not lag.

Nothing is ever perfect. I waited a long time to upgrade from BI 4 to 5. Just did it a week ago. I rarely sit at my BI machine. I use UI3 at my office desktop. It is an i7-3700k that I built back in 2012. In BI 4 I could run the UI3 interface at 15FPS, but now it lags/freezes. So I had to cut it down to 5FPS. It mildly pisses me off. But I know that the additional improvements made to BI 5 is worth it. This will probably make me upgrade my office PC as it could use a refresh anyways.
 

maxtoid

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Do you have a current support plan?
Are you sending the email as per the BI help file?
Make sure you are not using a private domain email, use gmail or the such.
Yes I've emailed him several times over the years and always gotten a response via my gmail - I think he's just been busy the past few months as I've put in a few different requests with no response.

^ What loony stated.

Well I guess until the issue is solved, you have to decide which is less of an issue, 1/8" black bar or lag/freezing in live view. You might try using HA for one cam at a time and see if you can get by w/o black bar and not lag.

Nothing is ever perfect. I waited a long time to upgrade from BI 4 to 5. Just did it a week ago. I rarely sit at my BI machine. I use UI3 at my office desktop. It is an i7-3700k that I built back in 2012. In BI 4 I could run the UI3 interface at 15FPS, but now it lags/freezes. So I had to cut it down to 5FPS. It mildly pisses me off. But I know that the additional improvements made to BI 5 is worth it. This will probably make me upgrade my office PC as it could use a refresh anyways.
Yeah I'm happy with the BI performance overall, just wish I could get the console to stop lagging is all. I ended up grabbing a Geforce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4GB GDDR5 128 Bit PCI-E Graphic Card for the host just to see if using that for the primary display helps with the lag issues at all. I recalled I had a cheap old GPU on my old BI server, but I didn't build this one out with a GPU at all so we'll see if that helps.
 
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