Blue Iris and Sharptools Media Tile question

C

cmderden79

n3wb
May 19, 2020
18
4
USA
Hi, first post and currently looking over the "newb" materials/pdf and have got through most without seeing this issue come up.

Setup - 200mbps ISP > Router > Gb switch > Blue Iris PC (6th gen i5, 16 gb ram). Four Amcrest IPM-841B cameras (2 mp). All cams running on wifi, none have been hard wired (yet).

So I have these all up and running on BI with almost no problems (front of house camera has a pretty weak wifi signal so stalls and jumps a bit, easy fix). I have CPU usage down to around 12% total, 5% for BI (1fps for live viewing, direct to disc basically looked at all the optimization information I could find). So again, CPU humming great, everything set to continuos record (currently only have 1TB hard drive in PC, my WD Purple 4TB arrives today and will be installed).

So now that I have BI fairly well configured for a start (I think) I wanted to set up some media tiles in SharpTools to view the streams from my tablet. I changed security to Non-Lan Only so I could access the stream at http://IP:Port/mjpg/camname. The preview of the first cam popped up, and all was well in the world. Added another, seemed fine. About the time I got to cam3 the images of my cams went away on my tiles. Wasn't sure why so I tried again...same thing. Contacted Sharptools and they quickly responded to check settings I had already set (session, non-lan, etc) I did and all was well. While waiting on another response I realized that all of my devices were running slow. Turns out my normal 150 Gbps wifi had dropped to around 30 or below. Checked speed at modem, still 227.

Once I removed the media tiles from Sharptools, all speeds began climbing back up. I test and confirmed this at least 3 times. Sharptools has no clue and believes it is tied to a blue iris setting (I assume in the webserver tab). Seems real odd to me that adding this mjpg stream would have such a large impact on my wifi...but again I am a newb and may be missing something simple. Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.
 
mjpg is quite bandwidth intensive, but you can do a lot to improve it. There are w and q parameters you can add to the URL to control image width and quality. E.g. ?w=640&q=50

Also, wifi is generally just garbage. A single device with a poor signal can cause a lot of speed problems for everyone, as a lot of the data sent and received by that device must be retransmitted, and all that additional airtime causes transmissions from other devices to be lost due to all the extra noise. So then that stuff needs retransmitted too. And it just causes a cascading effect of everything getting slower and worse.

Also IP cams tend to be a generation or two behind in the latest wifi standards so they are already forcing your network to operate in a slower mode a huge fraction of the time.
 
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bp2008 said:
mjpg is quite bandwidth intensive, but you can do a lot to improve it. There are w and q parameters you can add to the URL to control image width and quality. E.g. ?w=640&q=50

Also, wifi is generally just garbage. A single device with a poor signal can cause a lot of speed problems for everyone, as a lot of the data sent and received by that device must be retransmitted, and all that additional airtime causes transmissions from other devices to be lost due to all the extra noise. So then that stuff needs retransmitted too. And it just causes a cascading effect of everything getting slower and worse.

Also IP cams tend to be a generation or two behind in the latest wifi standards so they are already forcing your network to operate in a slower mode a huge fraction of the time.
Click to expand...

Much appreciated. So a couple of takeaways and follow ups. 1...hardwire your system lol. Definitely was a plan, but will probably now be pushed to the forefront. When doing so I understand it is much better to wire them to the switch that the PC is on, rather than the router correct? These current cams are not POE (neither is my switch) but for now they will do and atleast I will have the wire in place if I decide to go POE in future.

As for the mjpg - this is the method I found described in the sharptools forum for passing the feed to a media tile. I definitely don't need anything special running to that tablet, just a decent view. 1fps at a decent bitrate would be sufficient for these needs. Is there an alternative to pass that would be better suited than mjpg? Compression and video quality are definitely a little over my head.
 
Correct. Some routers don't have properly hardware-accelerated switching so unnecessary LAN traffic passing through the router can slow it down.
 
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Blue Iris does offer the ability to provide individual jpeg snapshots. I'm pretty sure that is the only way you could get the frame rate to be reduced as low as 1 FPS. I don't know anything about sharptools and what it is capable of though.
 
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bp2008 said:
Blue Iris does offer the ability to provide individual jpeg snapshots. I'm pretty sure that is the only way you could get the frame rate to be reduced as low as 1 FPS. I don't know anything about sharptools and what it is capable of though.
Click to expand...
I appreciate the help - yeah Sharptools is just a dashboard like Action Tiles if familiar with that. I will take the steps provided and try to get everything wired in before further testing outside blue iris.
 
bp2008 said:
There are w and q parameters you can add to the URL to control image width and quality. E.g. ?w=640&q=50
Click to expand...
cmderden79 said:
1fps at a decent bitrate would be sufficient for these needs.
Click to expand...

I recently noticed there is also an &fps= parameter that can be used with some HTTP commands like /mjpg/{cam-short-name}/video.mjpg.
Also a &kbps= parameter.

EDIT: Here's a description of this parameter ... see update notes for 4.4.0 - July 21, 2016

Update Fixes and Enhancements

Is there somewhere where one can find out details of what changes are being made in each Blue Iris software update? With the rapid releases happening again, four updates in five days, while I am hesitant to update until a release is known to be stable, it would be nice to know what issues or...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
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jaydeel said:
I recently noticed there is also an &fps= parameter that can be used with some HTTP commands like /mjpg/{cam-short-name}/video.mjpg.
Also a &kbps= parameter.
Click to expand...
can you give a moron an example of how to pass that command?
what I use now would be (zeroes of course are IP/Port). So to include the FPS= parameter be added. Or where would be a good start for a moron to begin educating himself on passing parameters in HTTP?
 
jaydeel said:
http://IPandPort/mjpg/{cam-short-name}/video.mjpg&fps=1

BTW, I've remapped the Bixby button on my Galaxy S9 to use this command to instantly view a camera group.
Click to expand...
whoa...that damn bixby button can be useful? Been a long time since I have visited messing with that thing (2 or 3 years) but at the time I couldn't find any workarounds for it. Can it now be remapped natively, or does it need to be rooted to do so?
 
butting in. just note that '&kbps' is effectively the quality setting when using h264. mjpg uses '&q.' Other parameters are for both.
 
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