Blue Iris flashing line

jwm1986

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I've been noticing over the past couple weeks that all my recordings have a flashing line at the bottom. It flashes green, purple, etc - like there is a decoding issue - but only for a very thin line at the very bottom. It stays for the duration of the recording and I do not see it when viewing live anywhere. No settings were changed that I am aware of, and since noticing I have installed on a different PC and the line followed. Is this a common thing, or some kind of bug at this point? Any one know where to start to fix it?

Thanks


Blue Iris 4.4.1.3 x64 (all cameras set to Blue Iris DVR recording mode w/ direct to disc)
Intel i5 3470t
8Gb RAM
 

bp2008

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What you describe is most likely caused by hardware accelerated clip playback. It only affects video resolutions that are not multiples of 16 (such as 1920x1080!), and if you are lucky it only takes the form of a streak along the bottom (or side, if the video is rotated). Sometimes it is a distracting color blob though.

Uncheck the "Also use for BVR playback" box in each camera properties under the Video tab. I recommend you do this for all cameras, even those which do not show this same bug, because there are many other little bugs involved in hardware accelerated clip playback, and the efficiency gain from having this feature enabled is minimal.
 

jwm1986

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That was the cause / fix! Thank you, sir!

(These were 1080p cams)
 

haxxorboi

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I'm also having this issue, but unchecking that option doesn't seem to fix the issue. The pixelated band starts at the top and slowly makes its way down to cover the entire area, causing motion detection alerts as well. I've restarted the cams (2xAmcrest IP3M-956E 3MP running at H264 standard, res: 2304x1296 @ 10FPS, VBR 5, 4096 bitrate) and server to no avail as well, but turning off acceleration either as the general setting or per camera fixes the issue (per camera fixes only that camera obviously). Interestingly, that res is actually fully divisible by 16.

Win10
BI 4.4.1.3 x64
i7-4790k
16GB
no discrete GPU
Continuous recording (just messing with this currently, will probably end up on motion trigger recording), 3sec pre-event, and recording to a DrivePool array.

Thoughts?
 
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bp2008

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I'm also having this issue, but unchecking that option doesn't seem to fix the issue. The pixelated band starts at the top and slowly makes its way down to cover the entire area, causing motion detection alerts as well.
Do you have any videos of this? I'm not sure what that would look like.

Possibly, you can correct it by setting the iframe interval of the camera equal to the frame rate. It is kind of a long shot but it is the only suggestion I have besides giving the Blue Iris developer access to the camera and seeing if he can figure out what is wrong. I guess you could just run without hardware acceleration on those cams, too, since apparently the non-accelerated decoder handles it fine.
 

haxxorboi

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Do you have any videos of this? I'm not sure what that would look like.

Possibly, you can correct it by setting the iframe interval of the camera equal to the frame rate. It is kind of a long shot but it is the only suggestion I have besides giving the Blue Iris developer access to the camera and seeing if he can figure out what is wrong. I guess you could just run without hardware acceleration on those cams, too, since apparently the non-accelerated decoder handles it fine.
It takes a while for the whole screen to creep up; maybe half hour or so. Once it's turned off it goes back to normal, and then if you turn it on it starts from the top again. Like it progressively builds on the pixelation from the encoding maybe? Here's screens of the the band after about 10 seconds, with HW decoding off, and then the whole shot pixelated.
10secpixelation.PNGnoHWdecoding.PNGwholepixelated.PNG

For now I'll just leave it off. It doesn't hurt the i7 that much honestly, but I like being able to offload the CPU for other things like h265 decoding in Plex if I can.
 

bp2008

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Interesting. I suggest you tell the Blue Iris developer about it and see if he would investigate if you give him access to one of the cameras that does it. Of course, working on that bug has to be balanced against his other priorities, and there is no guarantee he can fix it anyway...
 

pov2

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I've been noticing over the past couple weeks that all my recordings have a flashing line at the bottom. It flashes green, purple, etc - like there is a decoding issue - but only for a very thin line at the very bottom. It stays for the duration of the recording and I do not see it when viewing live anywhere. No settings were changed that I am aware of, and since noticing I have installed on a different PC and the line followed. Is this a common thing, or some kind of bug at this point? Any one know where to start to fix it?

Thanks


Blue Iris 4.4.1.3 x64 (all cameras set to Blue Iris DVR recording mode w/ direct to disc)
Intel i5 3470t
8Gb RAM


What you describe is most likely caused by hardware accelerated clip playback. It only affects video resolutions that are not multiples of 16 (such as 1920x1080!), and if you are lucky it only takes the form of a streak along the bottom (or side, if the video is rotated). Sometimes it is a distracting color blob though.

Uncheck the "Also use for BVR playback" box in each camera properties under the Video tab. I recommend you do this for all cameras, even those which do not show this same bug, because there are many other little bugs involved in hardware accelerated clip playback, and the efficiency gain from having this feature enabled is minimal.
I started having this flashing line issue when I cloned one of my Amcrest IP2M-841 cameras (still on the original firmware). The camera was only sending me the triggered alerts, the clone was setup to record continuously. First the clone had this line. After yesterday's update the BI restarted and now this line has moved to the original cam and disappeared from the clone. I started googling and found this thread.

I am on BI 5.0.2.2 and using Intel HW acceleration. Hardware accelerated decode "Also BVR" is unchecked everywhere (it was default I suppose). I kept looking what else could cause this and noticed that the cam with the line has resolution 1920x1088 but its clone has it as 1920x1080. I am sure when I was setting up this cam the resolution was 1920x1080. It looks like first the clone got this 1088 resolution and after restart the original cam got it and shows the line. Cam's resolution is 1920x1080 and the field "Size" is grayed out - I can't change it. I tried setting "Anamorphic (force size)" but it didn't get rid of the line.

@bp2008, you seem to know everything. Do you know what's gong on?

As a side note, after the update BI forgot the trigger zone for that camera and spammed me with a lot of alerts. On the same day I cloned the Amcrest IP3M-941 cam the same way, and there is no problem with a flashing line and the zones stayed.
 

bp2008

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@pov2 Back when hardware acceleration was first implemented, there was an issue where 1920x1080 cams produced a 1920x1088 output with the bottom 8 pixels a mess. Ken informed me this was because 1080 is not divisible by 16, so for technical reasons it has to use 1088 internally (which is divisible by 16) and crop off the bad 8 pixels afterward. So it does not particularly surprise me that there might be an issue with cloned cams sometimes showing 1088... Are you sure the hardware acceleration option is the same on the clone and the original? You may want to let BI support know, and provide screenshots showing the two cam properties pages where the resolution is different.
 

pov2

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@pov2 Back when hardware acceleration was first implemented, there was an issue where 1920x1080 cams produced a 1920x1088 output with the bottom 8 pixels a mess. Ken informed me this was because 1080 is not divisible by 16, so for technical reasons it has to use 1088 internally (which is divisible by 16) and crop off the bad 8 pixels afterward. So it does not particularly surprise me that there might be an issue with cloned cams sometimes showing 1088... Are you sure the hardware acceleration option is the same on the clone and the original? You may want to let BI support know, and provide screenshots showing the two cam properties pages where the resolution is different.
Thanks. So, I was right that you know everything :)
The options for the two cams are identical as I cloned one from the other. I double-checked and the HW acceleration is set to default for the cams and it is set to Intel without VPP in general settings.
I will contact support once I figure out how to do it.
 

bp2008

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In your Blue Iris settings window, there is a button called "Email support". It puts a bunch of text on your clipboard which you paste into a new email, and the first line of the pasted text will contain the email address you need to send to.
 
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