Hi everyone,
For a couple of years now I have been running Blue Iris on my premises to record streams from a number of different cameras. During this time I have slowly added a camera here or there to meet my needs. I recently decided to add another camera to my system and purchased a new Amcrest IP8M-2496EB camera. After adding the camera to Blue Iris a stream was pulled from the camera and it showed a crystal clear image almost instantly. At least, for a few seconds anyway. Blue Iris is unable to maintain a continued connection to the camera resulting in dropped connection about every 10-30 seconds. After the connection is lost the frame rate drops to 0.0 and the bit rate freezes. After about 30-45 seconds Blue Iris is able to regain a connection to the camera and the stream resumes. After this the connection is once again dropped after about 10-30 seconds and the cycle continues for as long as I allow.
After doing some reading on the forums I discovered several other people having similar issues with their setups. The solution that resolved most of their problems was to disable the "Use RTSP/stream timecode" check box under "Network options" in the problem device's settings page. I did so for my camera and it made no difference. After this I tried reducing the resolution and frame rate in the camera's setting significantly, thinking that may help. I checked that the frame rate and key frame were set the same as I had read that not doing so can also create issues. I also tried switching between H.264 and H.265 video compression. Still, no difference. I then tried disabling the other 8 cameras that were running in Blue Iris thinking it could be a system load issue. This also made no noticeable difference. In a last ditch effort to resolve the issue I upgraded the OS on my machine running BI from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 10 x64, after noticing Windows 7 was not an officially supported OS in BI. Sadly this also did not help as the issue remains. The only noticeable difference after the change from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was the behavior of VLC. When I opened the RTSP stream from the Amcrest camera in Windows 7 the stream would start almost right away and continue for hours with no problems. After "upgrading" to Windows 10 VLC is only able to start the stream 50% of the time. Once the stream is started in VLC it usually drops within 2 or 3 minutes and must be manually restarted.
I have installed an evaluation version of BI on another machine running on the same network. This machine is able to stream the camera image via both BI and VLC with no problems at all. The settings on both computers are identical in Blue Iris and are similar in hardware as well.
The machine running Blue Iris is an AMD FX-8350 with 16GB RAM. CPU utilization usually stays between 50 and 65 with all cameras triggered as direct to disc is enabled and none of my cameras are streaming above 10 FPS. Network usage on the single NIC is usually about 40-50 mbits/s combined.
At this point I am at a total loss for what the cause of this issue is. Is there anyone here that may be able to help me get to the bottom of this? It is truly driving me nuts.
For a couple of years now I have been running Blue Iris on my premises to record streams from a number of different cameras. During this time I have slowly added a camera here or there to meet my needs. I recently decided to add another camera to my system and purchased a new Amcrest IP8M-2496EB camera. After adding the camera to Blue Iris a stream was pulled from the camera and it showed a crystal clear image almost instantly. At least, for a few seconds anyway. Blue Iris is unable to maintain a continued connection to the camera resulting in dropped connection about every 10-30 seconds. After the connection is lost the frame rate drops to 0.0 and the bit rate freezes. After about 30-45 seconds Blue Iris is able to regain a connection to the camera and the stream resumes. After this the connection is once again dropped after about 10-30 seconds and the cycle continues for as long as I allow.
After doing some reading on the forums I discovered several other people having similar issues with their setups. The solution that resolved most of their problems was to disable the "Use RTSP/stream timecode" check box under "Network options" in the problem device's settings page. I did so for my camera and it made no difference. After this I tried reducing the resolution and frame rate in the camera's setting significantly, thinking that may help. I checked that the frame rate and key frame were set the same as I had read that not doing so can also create issues. I also tried switching between H.264 and H.265 video compression. Still, no difference. I then tried disabling the other 8 cameras that were running in Blue Iris thinking it could be a system load issue. This also made no noticeable difference. In a last ditch effort to resolve the issue I upgraded the OS on my machine running BI from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 10 x64, after noticing Windows 7 was not an officially supported OS in BI. Sadly this also did not help as the issue remains. The only noticeable difference after the change from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was the behavior of VLC. When I opened the RTSP stream from the Amcrest camera in Windows 7 the stream would start almost right away and continue for hours with no problems. After "upgrading" to Windows 10 VLC is only able to start the stream 50% of the time. Once the stream is started in VLC it usually drops within 2 or 3 minutes and must be manually restarted.
I have installed an evaluation version of BI on another machine running on the same network. This machine is able to stream the camera image via both BI and VLC with no problems at all. The settings on both computers are identical in Blue Iris and are similar in hardware as well.
The machine running Blue Iris is an AMD FX-8350 with 16GB RAM. CPU utilization usually stays between 50 and 65 with all cameras triggered as direct to disc is enabled and none of my cameras are streaming above 10 FPS. Network usage on the single NIC is usually about 40-50 mbits/s combined.
At this point I am at a total loss for what the cause of this issue is. Is there anyone here that may be able to help me get to the bottom of this? It is truly driving me nuts.
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