"Almost any camera can do well in the daytime"? The IPC-Color4K-T sure can't....

[TuckNTruck]

So I bought an IPC-Color4K-T to set up as a sky cam and had no issues with it at all. Got bored with the sky cam after a few weeks so I put it to better use on the boat dock. A while back I posted this thread EmpireTech PTZ425DB glitchy background? about the same issue I'm having on the IPC4KT.

Image quality is terrible. It's a blocky, blurry mess. If I needed this camera to read a boat registration or get a decent identify-quality picture of someone on or near my dock, I'd be out of luck - the camera can't do it.

I've tried different compression, resolutions, frame rate, bit rate, I frame, image adjustments, exposure, noise reduction, receive buffer, everything.

I have gigabit fiber to the house, a 60 ghz gigabit p2p bridge to the dock, and cameras powered by a POE+ switch. I've tested all the ports on the switch - all getting gigabit speed, no packet loss, 1-3 ms pings for thousands of pings.

The problem seems to be that the image gets too busy for the camera to process due to the choppy water in about half of the image. When the water is calm, the picture is perfect. When it's nighttime and the water isn't visible, again, a perfect image. But as soon as there's any chop/ripples in the water, the image becomes an unusable blocky mess as seen in the video below.

I have an old 5442 varifocal on the other end of the dock in the same position/angle looking the other way on the swim platform and it doesn't have any problems. It has a very clear image that isn't affected by waves/ripples/shadows/anything.

Another thing that makes me think the camera just can't process the images is that the camera freezes up or gives a "no signal" status when the bitrate is cranked up and the waves are especially choppy. At night, I never get any "no signal" or any type of pausing/freezing. But as soon as the sun comes up and the chop starts, the no signal error comes back. I've seen a dozen signal losses or more per hour before.

Been using Blue Iris for a couple years now, feel pretty confident that it's not something with the settings or network/cables/etc. Based on my experience with the ptz425db and the responses on that thread, I'm convinced that this is a camera limitation. I expected way more out of a $230 camera.

If anyone has suggestions of what I might be missing, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise, if you're considering any of these newer cameras and you have a busy background - don't buy one. They're useless. The claim that "almost any camera can do well in the daytime" definitely does not apply to the EmpireTech PTZ425DB or the EmpireTech IPC-Color4K-T.

What are the odds that a hikvision camera would handle a busy scene better than the IPC/Dahua cameras?

 

[garycrist]

Good old MPEG recording or whatever encoder is in use. The reason for the problem as you noted,
is the water and no movement of the dock. All of the processor's time is being use up by the water
then the bad thing happen. There are sweet spots in all of these cams.

 

[mat200]

So I bought an IPC-Color4K-T to set up as a sky cam and had no issues with it at all. Got bored with the sky cam after a few weeks so I put it to better use on the boat dock. A while back I posted this thread EmpireTech PTZ425DB glitchy background? about the same issue I'm having on the IPC4KT.

Image quality is terrible. It's a blocky, blurry mess. If I needed this camera to read a boat registration or get a decent identify-quality picture of someone on or near my dock, I'd be out of luck - the camera can't do it.

I've tried different compression, resolutions, frame rate, bit rate, I frame, image adjustments, exposure, noise reduction, receive buffer, everything.

I have gigabit fiber to the house, a 60 ghz gigabit p2p bridge to the dock, and cameras powered by a POE+ switch. I've tested all the ports on the switch - all getting gigabit speed, no packet loss, 1-3 ms pings for thousands of pings.

The problem seems to be that the image gets too busy for the camera to process due to the choppy water in about half of the image. When the water is calm, the picture is perfect. When it's nighttime and the water isn't visible, again, a perfect image. But as soon as there's any chop/ripples in the water, the image becomes an unusable blocky mess as seen in the video below.

I have an old 5442 varifocal on the other end of the dock in the same position/angle looking the other way on the swim platform and it doesn't have any problems. It has a very clear image that isn't affected by waves/ripples/shadows/anything.

Another thing that makes me think the camera just can't process the images is that the camera freezes up or gives a "no signal" status when the bitrate is cranked up and the waves are especially choppy. At night, I never get any "no signal" or any type of pausing/freezing. But as soon as the sun comes up and the chop starts, the no signal error comes back. I've seen a dozen signal losses or more per hour before.

Been using Blue Iris for a couple years now, feel pretty confident that it's not something with the settings or network/cables/etc. Based on my experience with the ptz425db and the responses on that thread, I'm convinced that this is a camera limitation. I expected way more out of a $230 camera.

If anyone has suggestions of what I might be missing, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise, if you're considering any of these newer cameras and you have a busy background - don't buy one. They're useless. The claim that "almost any camera can do well in the daytime" definitely does not apply to the EmpireTech PTZ425DB or the EmpireTech IPC-Color4K-T.

What are the odds that a hikvision camera would handle a busy scene better than the IPC/Dahua cameras?

Better cameras have a ton of tuning parameters.

First to check :
H264 or 265 ?

Dahua Hikvision .. both brands make a lot of different models. Some very affordable and some which you'll need a small loan for ..

Imho both brands offer great options and are close to each other in terms of offerings

Focus on tuning parameters now to get what you prefer .. chances are you can get better results with tuning instead of just hoping the default settings give you the results you want to see.

 

[TuckNTruck]

Better cameras have a ton of tuning parameters.

First to check :
H264 or 265 ?

Dahua Hikvision .. both brands make a lot of different models. Some very affordable and some which you'll need a small loan for ..

Imho both brands offer great options and are close to each other in terms of offerings

Focus on tuning parameters now to get what you prefer .. chances are you can get better results with tuning instead of just hoping the default settings give you the results you want to see.

This video was in H264, but I've had very little difference with any of the other encoding options/bitrates/etc. None of the settings give an image that's even close to usable. None of my cameras are set to defaults - every one of them is adjusted for its specific setting. No amount of tinkering with different combinations has given a decent image quality. I know what the camera is capable of and I know it's not just a settings issue because when the water is smooth, the image is fantastic. I'm sure in most settings around a house, it's a fine camera. But for my specific use around water that's usually choppy? Worthless.

The part that's frustrating to me is my old 5442 in the same environment with the same busy background is great - no issues at all. My old SD49225XA also had no issues in the same spot. I even have an old $65 IPC-HDW2431T that does show an occasional glitch in the background when it's really choppy on the water, but overall gives a much better image than this $230 latest and greatest model. Seems to me like Dahua is using cheaper components and charging more money simply because they can label it 4K on a 1/1.2 sensor. It's a shame it doesn't have even close to the processing power to render that image....

 

[bigredfish]

In all fairness, these cameras are cheap. Go price higher end Axis...

That said, Here's my 3.6mm 4K turret. I run 16384, CBR, 30FPS, H264.h, General Encoding. Running on a PoE NVR from 2017-2018
Never have glitches as you describe, certainly no drop outs.
I do see pulsing, its worse with lower bitrates

Is this as bad as yours? My eyes arent what they used to be

Both 30 sec. One with light wind one with very little

View attachment Home_ch11_20240702110648_20240702110718.mp4

















View attachment Home_ch11_20240702183948_20240702184028.mp4

 

[tigerwillow1]

You could try ROI. Works pretty well sometimes. The shape of the dock won't fit nicely with the ROI rectangle, still worth a try IMO..

 

[looktall]

Never have glitches as you describe, certainly no drop outs.

It would be interesting to see if the cameras in the first post were moved out from under the roof if the issue cleared up.

Or it could be that yours has more water visible rather than dock and it's able to balance it out better?

 

[bigredfish]

I'm still wondering if there's something in between the camera and that exported clip that's creating a problem?

 

[TuckNTruck]

In all fairness, these cameras are cheap. Go price higher end Axis...

That said, Here's my 3.6mm 4K turret. I run 16384, CBR, 30FPS, H264.h, General Encoding. Running on a PoE NVR from 2017-2018
Never have glitches as you describe, certainly no drop outs.
I do see pulsing, its worse with lower bitrates

Is this as bad as yours? My eyes arent what they used to be

Both 30 sec. One with light wind one with very little

No, yours are nowhere near as bad as mine. Yours look great, but I would be interested in seeing what it looks like if someone stood on your dock when the water is a little choppy to see if the image quality around the person is degraded at all. I actually searched for some of your posts before posting my comments because I knew you had a water view. I can see the image refresh at the iframe update, but yours doesn't get blocky like mine. My water view has a lot more water and it's a lot busier than yours though. I think it's just overloading the processor because of all the motion going on. I'm going to try a few other things tomorrow morning. The glitches and dropouts only happen during daylight hours and when there's a decent amount of choppiness in the water. There are no issues when it's dark out. There are no issues when the water is smooth like in your videos. I guess if nothing else helps, I'll have to angle the camera down to get more of the dock and less of the water in the view, but that half way defeats the purpose of this camera - to see activity on the water within 10-20' of the dock.

I'm still wondering if there's something in between the camera and that exported clip that's creating a problem?

Nope, the quality you see on YT is the same quality I see in BI. The picture quality is so bad it seems like it HAS to be a network issue or something. It looks worse than a substream, but the picture is perfect at night and when the water is smooth. It only happens when the water starts to get choppy. I can also max out the bitrate (16K something) during those calm/dark times and have no "NoSignal" alerts or freeze ups. But at 16K bitrate when the water is rough, I get all sorts of "NoSignal" alerts and frozen images when viewing the camera. I have to drop the bitrate to less than 10,000 when the water is rough. So it seems again that this is a data processing limitation in the camera - it just can't keep up.

It would be interesting to see if the cameras in the first post were moved out from under the roof if the issue cleared up.

Or it could be that yours has more water visible rather than dock and it's able to balance it out better?

That's one of the things I had planned to do tomorrow. I don't really want to but if it helps, that's a better solution than restricting the view of the water. I've had the old 5442 positioned under the roof and at least 75% of the view was water - never had a single issue like this. That camera is rock solid. Makes me wonder if the new version of the 5442 would be the same quality as the old one or if it would have the same limitations as this color 4K.

You could try ROI. Works pretty well sometimes. The shape of the dock won't fit nicely with the ROI rectangle, still worth a try IMO..

Yep, for some reason neither chrome nor Edge/IE show the live view in the web interface so I haven't been able to play with ROI yet. I downloaded Firefox and the web interface works, so I'll try ROI tomorrow.

 

[steve1225]

This is encoder problem - it uses to much bandwidth to code water changes - so there is not space for the rest.
Both Dahua and HIK are using different SOC's (integrated CPU with GPU, image processor and AI processor) from different companies (mostly Chinese).
There are huge difference how h.264/h.265 encoding works on them - depending of the model.

I found that on same models which have problem with 1 or 2 second scene blinking (depending of iframe value in encoder menu), changing to AI Coding helps a lot. You can try to switch h.264, h.264H and h.265 and compare. Decrease FPS and iframes to 15 and increasing max bandwidth should help.

ps. Full color cameras (so Color4K, but not 5442) do a lot digital sharpening on image (to hide problem with out of focus image due big aperture and sensor) - this creates a lot of digital details, which encoder must encode. You can try to decrease a lot Sharpness value in picture settings.

 

[SOB]

Another thing that makes me think the camera just can't process the images is that the camera freezes up or gives a "no signal" status when the bitrate is cranked up and the waves are especially choppy. At night, I never get any "no signal" or any type of pausing/freezing. But as soon as the sun comes up and the chop starts, the no signal error comes back. I've seen a dozen signal losses or more per hour before.

It might not be the same issue, but many of us had intermittent 'no signal' issues with the Color4K-T(180) cameras for quite a while. See the thread linked below, starting at post #50 for possible solutions. For me the solution was to enabling 'decoder compatibility mode' under the camera settings, video tab, configure page.

IPC-Color4K-T180 Intermittent 'No Signal' in BI

I run my 4K T180 at H264 both main and substream, Bit rate of 10240 CBR, 15 FPS and 15 I Frame. Substream is the same except resolution and Bit Rate of 512. I also run my 4K-T and 4K-X with the same settings. Right before I commented on this post, I updated the firmware on all of my 4k-T's and...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[The Automation Guy]

Nope, the quality you see on YT is the same quality I see in BI.

Yep, for some reason neither chrome nor Edge/IE show the live view in the web interface so I haven't been able to play with ROI yet. I downloaded Firefox and the web interface works, so I'll try ROI tomorrow.

I was going to ask how the raw footage from the camera looked without using BI, but I guess that hasn't been working on your browsers. My gut feeling is that this is a BI issue and not a camera issue, but seeing the live image is really the only way to confirm or debunk this theory. You could always try recording a clip to a SD card in the camera and then playing it back on another machine as well.

Keep us updated on your progress.

 

[EMPIRETECANDY]

@Wildcat_1 have the different settings for day and night for your reference based on the light situation day and night

Dahua IPC HDW5849H & IPC HFW5849T1 / Color4k-T & Color4K-X - Revisit - Pt. 1Day Time (youtube.com)

(77) Dahua IPC-HDW5849H & IPC-HFW5849T1 / Color4k-T & Color4K-X - Revisit - Pt. 2 - Night Time - YouTube

 

[TuckNTruck]

Okay, been tinkering with the settings all morning, and I guess I've got it as good as it can get which is to say MUCH better than the YT video I posted yesterday, but still not perfect.

I've been able to get the image to be usable for the swim platform and at the water within several feet of the dock making these changes:

Dropped frame rate from 30 to 20 FPS. Going any lower on the FPS makes the water chop look annoyingly glitchy even though it's a clean image. Just don't like it, though it would probably improve the overall performance if I went down to 15 FPS.
H264 (same as before, 265 was the worst, other 264s didn't seem to make a real difference in image quality)
Resolution from 8MP down to 4MP. This was a bummer, but definite improvement.
Bit rate can go as high as 12288 before glitches in BI start happening
I frame 20
Turned off the sub stream (no idea if this did anything, but I don't really need the CPU savings, so I just turned it off. Maybe that's one less thing the camera has to process?

Set up 4 ROI blocks at quality 1. The blocks cover up portions of the water away from the dock. I couldn't really use this as much as I wanted because of the angle of the camera and the area I want to view. When I cover up water in the distance, it blocks my view of someone's head if they're standing on the dock, so I was limited in areas I could use ROI but it definitely helps.

I'm not really happy with this "solution" so I'm going to move the 4K camera to the other end of the swim platform where I currently have the 5442 and I'll move the 5442 to where the 4K is now. The other angle where the 5442 is now does have less water in view and the water is usually smoother closer to the shoreline where that camera is pointed. I figure maybe I can get back to the 8MP settings and use ROI more effectively (or not need it at all) at the different angle. Should have time to do that tomorrow...

It might not be the same issue, but many of us had intermittent 'no signal' issues with the Color4K-T(180) cameras for quite a while. See the thread linked below, starting at post #50 for possible solutions. For me the solution was to enabling 'decoder compatibility mode' under the camera settings, video tab, configure page.

IPC-Color4K-T180 Intermittent 'No Signal' in BI

I run my 4K T180 at H264 both main and substream, Bit rate of 10240 CBR, 15 FPS and 15 I Frame. Substream is the same except resolution and Bit Rate of 512. I also run my 4K-T and 4K-X with the same settings. Right before I commented on this post, I updated the firmware on all of my 4k-T's and...

ipcamtalk.com

Thanks, I enabled "decoder compatibility mode". We'll see what happens. No change with the image quality issues, but maybe it'll help with the "NoSignal" errors.

I was going to ask how the raw footage from the camera looked without using BI, but I guess that hasn't been working on your browsers. My gut feeling is that this is a BI issue and not a camera issue, but seeing the live image is really the only way to confirm or debunk this theory. You could always try recording a clip to a SD card in the camera and then playing it back on another machine as well.

Keep us updated on your progress.

Okay, looking at the raw footage vs BI shows no difference - same blocky mess in the web interface as in BI until I made the changes noted above. That said, whenever the BI image froze, I could switch over to the web interface and it was streaming just fine - it NEVER froze even when BI was frozen for 10-20 seconds. So you're on to something...When BI freezes at the higher bitrates, the web interface doesn't. After making the changes above, no more freezes or dropouts in BI so far.

 

[bigredfish]

I was going to ask how the raw footage from the camera looked without using BI, but I guess that hasn't been working on your browsers. My gut feeling is that this is a BI issue and not a camera issue, but seeing the live image is really the only way to confirm or debunk this theory. You could always try recording a clip to a SD card in the camera and then playing it back on another machine as well.

Keep us updated on your progress.

That was where I was going

 

[Wildcat_1]

Okay, been tinkering with the settings all morning, and I guess I've got it as good as it can get which is to say MUCH better than the YT video I posted yesterday, but still not perfect.

I've been able to get the image to be usable for the swim platform and at the water within several feet of the dock making these changes:

Dropped frame rate from 30 to 20 FPS. Going any lower on the FPS makes the water chop look annoyingly glitchy even though it's a clean image. Just don't like it, though it would probably improve the overall performance if I went down to 15 FPS.
H264 (same as before, 265 was the worst, other 264s didn't seem to make a real difference in image quality)
Resolution from 8MP down to 4MP. This was a bummer, but definite improvement.
Bit rate can go as high as 12288 before glitches in BI start happening
I frame 20
Turned off the sub stream (no idea if this did anything, but I don't really need the CPU savings, so I just turned it off. Maybe that's one less thing the camera has to process?

Set up 4 ROI blocks at quality 1. The blocks cover up portions of the water away from the dock. I couldn't really use this as much as I wanted because of the angle of the camera and the area I want to view. When I cover up water in the distance, it blocks my view of someone's head if they're standing on the dock, so I was limited in areas I could use ROI but it definitely helps.

I'm not really happy with this "solution" so I'm going to move the 4K camera to the other end of the swim platform where I currently have the 5442 and I'll move the 5442 to where the 4K is now. The other angle where the 5442 is now does have less water in view and the water is usually smoother closer to the shoreline where that camera is pointed. I figure maybe I can get back to the 8MP settings and use ROI more effectively (or not need it at all) at the different angle. Should have time to do that tomorrow...



Thanks, I enabled "decoder compatibility mode". We'll see what happens. No change with the image quality issues, but maybe it'll help with the "NoSignal" errors.


Okay, looking at the raw footage vs BI shows no difference - same blocky mess in the web interface as in BI until I made the changes noted above. That said, whenever the BI image froze, I could switch over to the web interface and it was streaming just fine - it NEVER froze even when BI was frozen for 10-20 seconds. So you're on to something...When BI freezes at the higher bitrates, the web interface doesn't. After making the changes above, no more freezes or dropouts in BI so far.

Send me a DM and we can talk about what you're seeing and potentially how to fix etc. Let me know