Blue Iris UI3
- Thread starter bp2008
- Start date
lgRich
Young grasshopper
You were 100% correct. I wouldn't have guessed that in 100 years. Thanks!
Morning, BP. I have a question regarding required Mbps from my ISP for UI3 to work from a remote location. I recently changed to Comcast and when I use my usual OpenVPN to access my cameras from work, it can't keep up. I'm getting over 1Mbps up at home and I can't keep a 1MP stream from running anymore. 480p streams are a little better but all are basically unusable. Prior with AT&T, there was no issue with similar Mbps.
Is this something to take up with Comcast? Is 1Mbps not enough to handle a UI3 window at 2mp?
Is this something to take up with Comcast? Is 1Mbps not enough to handle a UI3 window at 2mp?
The quality of the ISP's network has a lot to do with it. If their network is overloaded or unreliable you might get wildly fluctuating speeds.
What you need to do is figure out how much upload bandwidth you can depend on having, and configure UI3 to not try to exceed it. One way you could do this is to open UI3's "Stats for nerds" panel (right click the video player area to see this option) where there is a graph of the video bit rate.
Here is an example:
As you can see mine is easily achieving 3.6 Mbps or 3600 Kbps. Your graph is probably more spiky.
Anyway, UI3's settings panel has an option for setting a global bit rate limit for H.264 streams. The value you need put in there will probably be less than 1000. The 480p quality choice uses 456 as its bit rate limit so that could be a good starting point.
giomania
IPCT Contributor
- Jun 1, 2017
- 784
- 540
A little OT, but since you are new to Comcast, beware of their monthly data cap. Since this a family friendly forum, let me just say I refer to them with Al Swearengen’s favorite curse word!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Haha thanks. Yes it's 1TB. I assume that's down only and not up? I stream my BI feed 9 hours a day while I'm at the office. I don't intend to do that forever but I'm currently fine tuning my motion alerts so it's on all day while at work.
I'm sure it counts both directions.
950 Kbps * 9 hours is only 3.8475 gigabytes. So if you stream for 9 hours every weekday you will still be under 100 GB of this traffic in a month.
Note this doesn't include the audio stream, which is very poorly compressed coming out of BI, but the audio stream shouldn't be a terribly high bit rate anyway. If you even have one.
950 Kbps * 9 hours is only 3.8475 gigabytes. So if you stream for 9 hours every weekday you will still be under 100 GB of this traffic in a month.
Note this doesn't include the audio stream, which is very poorly compressed coming out of BI, but the audio stream shouldn't be a terribly high bit rate anyway. If you even have one.
giomania
IPCT Contributor
- Jun 1, 2017
- 784
- 540
BP is right...both directions
Get their app, and it is easy to monitor.
We are a family of five, so I have to keep close tabs on it, and we use our two courtesy months in June and July when the kids are out of school.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Get their app, and it is easy to monitor.
We are a family of five, so I have to keep close tabs on it, and we use our two courtesy months in June and July when the kids are out of school.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Yep, got the ap, been watching it. Divided by 30 that's 34gigs per day, I'm under that so far but still too new to tell. I got this internet for cord cutting purposes so heavy streaming will go down. Let's see how it fares before I cancel the whole deal before the first 30 days is up. In the meantime I'll check if my old AT&T service is unlimited. The current ones are not. If it is, I may need to stick to it before I cancel it tomorrow.
Ok so an update for any future Comcast users: Apparently their 25/2 plan is not good enough to stream out a UI3 window, at least in my case. You may want to check your particular upload speeds, as mine was just not good enough. I was dropping and losing connection constantly. Not only orange clocks, but red critical network error windows in UI3. It seems that Comcast's cheapest plan upload is very bad. I was barely hanging on to 1Mbps with constant drop outs to 200kps and lower. Entirely useless. YMMV.
I'm still within the 30-day period to cancel so I upgraded to the 60/5 plan and instantly the problem was fixed (for the hour or so before reporting this). Steady 5Mbps no problem and sometimes more. I'm still locking it down to 950kbps as the difference between that and full bore 2-5Mbps is negligible for live views. No sense in wasting bandwidth when you're capped at 1TB/mo.
If this stays reliable for the next couple of weeks, I may just keep it. If not, I'll dump Comcast and go back to AT&T (no data caps with U-Verse TV).
Thanks everyone for the help!
I'm still within the 30-day period to cancel so I upgraded to the 60/5 plan and instantly the problem was fixed (for the hour or so before reporting this). Steady 5Mbps no problem and sometimes more. I'm still locking it down to 950kbps as the difference between that and full bore 2-5Mbps is negligible for live views. No sense in wasting bandwidth when you're capped at 1TB/mo.
If this stays reliable for the next couple of weeks, I may just keep it. If not, I'll dump Comcast and go back to AT&T (no data caps with U-Verse TV).
Thanks everyone for the help!
It sounds like they probably increased your priority in their routers due to your more expensive plan. 2 Mbps upload is more than enough for UI3 if their network is performing properly (which based on Comcast's reputation is not very common).
Yup. That was my hope when I upgraded the plan. I had ordered the 25/2 plan thinking it would be fine as my old plan with AT&T was 24/2 and was flawless. Surely "cable" internet would beat that, right? Hah. Not so much. No matter, it's an extra $10/mo and now I have 60/5 so it's actually a win/win. BP, just to verify, when I minimize the UI3 window, streaming stops, correct? Just making sure to manage usage.
Yeah, if UI3 is minimized or on an inactive tab it should stop streaming. You can verify by looking at network usage in task manager.
It also throttles back the periodic status updates to 45 seconds apart or something, just enough to keep your session from expiring. So it will use very little bandwidth while idle.
It also throttles back the periodic status updates to 45 seconds apart or something, just enough to keep your session from expiring. So it will use very little bandwidth while idle.
Ssayer
BIT Beta Team
Yahoo! I finally got UI3 working with sound using a Raspberry Pi 3! Not being very well versed in Linux, it probably took way longer than it should have to figure it out. What doesn't help is when your web searches always seem to end up with someone's advice being to try installing a ton of stuff to make it work (and it never seems to work *for me*). It was the H264 hurdle that took all the time, and the fix was so very simple. Don't listen to the sellers as they all seem sold on plain Debian, just install Raspbian (which is Debian optimized for the PI), and you're golden! The stock browser works great, nothing else needed. Very nice having it hooked up to an old 18" LCD TV that wasn't doing anything except sitting it my garage. 
Yahoo! I finally got UI3 working with sound using a Raspberry Pi 3! Not being very well versed in Linux, it probably took way longer than it should have to figure it out. What doesn't help is when your web searches always seem to end up with someone's advice being to try installing a ton of stuff to make it work (and it never seems to work *for me*). It was the H264 hurdle that took all the time, and the fix was so very simple. Don't listen to the sellers as they all seem sold on Debian, just install Raspbian (which is Debian optimized for the PI), and you're golden! The stock browser works great, nothing else needed. Very nice having it hooked up to an old 18" LCD TV that wasn't doing anything except sitting it my garage.
"just install raspbian" well I could have told you that
My guess is other OS distributions probably don't include the right graphics drivers to be able to use the pi's built in h.264 hardware acceleration.
Ssayer
BIT Beta Team
"just install raspbian" well I could have told you that
My guess is other OS distributions probably don't include the right graphics drivers to be able to use the pi's built in h.264 hardware acceleration.
Hah! Sometimes the hardest part of this stuff is figuring out the right question to ask and the right place to ask it, eh? I have to believe that you're correct on the hardware acceleration drivers.