Blue Iris Hikvision video corruption with graphic overlay

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I made an account on this forum today to share a discovery I just made. This forum has been a great resource during the troubleshooting of my security setup, so I decided to share my findings in hopes that it helps someone else down the line.

I was getting some pretty bad corruption during the playback of recordings from my Hikvision cameras through Blue Iris. Here are some of my system details:

i3-3220
8gb ram
Windows 10 (fresh install)
10 Hikvision turret cameras (1080p @ 15fps), all hardwired directly to PoE switch. iframes set to 15. Buffer set to 10MB.
Hardware decoding (no VPP) enabled
Motion detection enabled
Direct-to-disk enabled
BVR enabled
120GB SSD
stunnel proxy

Live view through the mobile app and on web app were perfect. Only during playback of recordings would I see ghosting and a recurring "rainbow screen." CPU usage was about 60%.

Since I thought that maybe my i3 was somewhat underpowered (I read somewhere that gen 1 quicksync was a little lacking), I upgraded to an i5-6500--a much newer and faster processor that required the purchase of a new motherboard and memory. I fired up BI and to my dismay, throwing some extra horsepower at the problem was not effective.

I looked at the camera statuses in BI and saw that my framerates were all hovering around 5 fps. Yikes. Could it be my network setup? I connected the computer directly to the PoE switch. Nope. Was it Blue Iris? I connected to a camera with VLC and saw 15 fps--right where it should be.

So I uninstalled BI and reinstalled it again. I added one camera and the fps was pegged at 15 fps. Perfect. One by one I added my cameras back until I got to one camera with a graphic overlay used as a privacy screen. Once I added that one, all cameras dropped back down to 5 fps. I removed the graphic overlay and they all came back up to 15 fps. Wow. Finally. Now, playback is buttery smooth.

I realize that I should have used the built-in graphic overlay in the camera itself, but I couldn't get it to work so I gave up. Maybe I'll give that another go.

Now I'm wondering if I should revert my system back to the i3.

Not sure if it matters, but the graphic overlay was a png stored in C:\BlueIris\.

UPDATE: I switched back to my i3.
i5-6500: 26% CPU usage
i3-3220: 54% CPU usage

TL; DR: If you're getting video corruption, ghosting, or "rainbow screen" during video playback and you have tried all of the solutions posted in other threads (direct to disk, use quicksync, lower fps, match iframe to fps, increase buffer to 10MB, don't use wifi, use a fresh install of Windows) AND you have a graphics overlay, remove the graphics overlay.
 
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