Blue Iris UI3

Very interesting. That looks just like an old issue that I thought was isolated to Firefox that they finally fixed around a year ago.

The problem is, some HTML5 video implementations were only designed to work with typical VOD (video on demand) distribution, where video is delivered in fairly large chunks that are at least a few seconds long, and always begin with an i-frame.

UI3's streaming works nothing like that. Because it needs to be low latency, UI3 delivers video in chunks that are only one frame long. And because it needs to be bandwidth-efficient, it goes a really long time between i-frames.

So your HTML5 player is decoding all the video it has, then it throws away its decoder state. When another chunk of video arrives, it has to rewind to the previous i-frame and begin decoding from there. As the stream progresses, that i-frame gets further and further away so the amount of work it has to do gets bigger and bigger. So it causes stutters that get continuously worse until the next i-frame arrives.

I suspect your mac is doing something similar to that with its HTML5 player. It doesn't like the low latency video streaming methodology.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MrRobinHood and looney2ns
bp2008 said:
Very interesting. That looks just like an old issue that I thought was isolated to Firefox that they finally fixed around a year ago.

The problem is, some HTML5 video implementations were only designed to work with typical VOD (video on demand) distribution, where video is delivered in fairly large chunks that are at least a few seconds long, and always begin with an i-frame.

UI3's streaming works nothing like that. Because it needs to be low latency, UI3 delivers video in chunks that are only one frame long. And because it needs to be bandwidth-efficient, it goes a really long time between i-frames.

So your HTML5 player is decoding all the video it has, then it throws away its decoder state. When another chunk of video arrives, it has to rewind to the previous i-frame and begin decoding from there. As the stream progresses, that i-frame gets further and further away so the amount of work it has to do gets bigger and bigger. So it causes stutters that get continuously worse until the next i-frame arrives.

I suspect your mac is doing something similar to that with its HTML5 player. It doesn't like the low latency video streaming methodology.
Click to expand...

So I can fix it by setting GOP as 1 then :rofl: :rofl:
 
I think this must be a new setting, but I just noticed a pure 4k setting in addition to the VBR version, which is really nice!

Seems to work well with a decent frame rate with limited testing.

1645569147007.png
 
Heh, the pure 4K version has been there for as long as UI3 has had configurable streaming profiles (which is a long time indeed). The 2160P VBR option is a lot newer actually (and even it has been around for a long time now).

The 4K version is limited to 8192 Kbps bit rate, which is the highest Blue Iris will allow you to set while still having a bit rate limit. You can get higher quality if you disable the bit rate limit in the 2160p streaming profile, but I don't recommend it because the bit rate can get crazy high when you do that.
 
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns, sebastiantombs and MrRobinHood
How strange! I'm sure it was only the VBR versions available before! Oh well, maybe it was me just overloaded with info trying to get to grips with everything at first and not seeing it.

bp2008 said:
The 4K version is limited to 8192 Kbps bit rate, which is the highest Blue Iris will allow you to set while still having a bit rate limit. You can get higher quality if you disable the bit rate limit in the 2160p streaming profile, but I don't recommend it because the bit rate can get crazy high when you do that.
Click to expand...

I think I have my 4k cam bit rates maxed out at 16k constant native, But for UI3 live viewing the default looks grand :)
Would rather that load and play smoothly than miss chunks of seconds at a time and get real time lag.
 
ETA: Never mind, got it. Apparently I had a group named "Car" that included the other two cams. Deleted that group and works fine now. I'll leave this in case someone else does the same.

Seems I've screwed something up...

While trying to set things up to show various cams automatically when triggered on an Echo Show I had to rename a cam in BI from "Cars" to "Car" to resolve a name conflict. That all works fine.

But now when I go to UI3 and click on that cam to display it, I get a group of two other cams displayed instead. That is, when I click on the "Car" cam in the multi-display to show the single car cam, I get a two others displayed side-by-side: a cam named "SW" and a cam named "PTZ." UI3 also displays a message in a red box at lower right saying "Group layout metadata is missing for "car." Probably a Blue Iris bug."

The single cam displays alone fine if I click it in BI.

WTF did I do? lol Again, the only change that I recall making within BI for that cam is simply renaming it from "Cars" to "Car."
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: bp2008
Very nice job @bp2008 on the UI3 timeline! The glowing blue "current time indicator" is cool and the overall functionality is excellent. Thank you! What does the gap between the recorded video and the current time represent? Not yet written to disk?

Screen Shot 2022-03-12 at 02.27.26 PM.png

(Yes, I have each camera set to a different color and it's kind of obnoxious but helps identify them.)

In a future release, would you ever consider adding the ability to make the timeline taller by dragging it up? The icons for trigger/motion could appear on the specific cameras layers on which they occurred?
 
  • Like
Reactions: fenderman and bp2008
aesterling said:
Very nice job @bp2008 on the UI3 timeline! The glowing blue "current time indicator" is cool and the overall functionality is excellent. Thank you! What does the gap between the recorded video and the current time represent? Not yet written to disk?

View attachment 121884

(Yes, I have each camera set to a different color and it's kind of obnoxious but helps identify them.)

In a future release, would you ever consider adding the ability to make the timeline taller by dragging it up? The icons for trigger/motion could appear on the specific cameras layers on which they occurred?
Click to expand...

Thanks, it was such a huge amount of work. Absolutely the most effort ever required for a new UI3 feature. I think even adding H.264 streaming back in the early days was easier than this!

Blue Iris only updates its timeline/clip metadata every 10 seconds, and UI3 can only poll for timeline data updates periodically, so there is always a bit of delay; that is why the bars usually don't reach all the way up to the live point. So it is common for the area under the blue gradient to be empty (+/- some seconds). In a few cases I've seen bars extend beyond the live point, but that is rare.

I don't think I'm going to make the timeline vertically resizable.

But I will probably add tiny vertical lines on the colored bars to show which colors were alerted. That is something Blue Iris does in the local console. I personally don't like it for the visual noise it creates in a motion-triggered-recording setup, which is why it will be optional once I add that capability.
 
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: looney2ns, MikeLud1, fenderman and 2 others
bp2008 said:
Thanks, it was such a huge amount of work. Absolutely the most effort ever required for a new UI3 feature. I think even adding H.264 streaming back in the early days was easier than this!

Blue Iris only updates its timeline/clip metadata every 10 seconds, and UI3 can only poll for timeline data updates periodically, so there is always a bit of delay; that is why the bars usually don't reach all the way up to the live point. So it is common for the area under the blue gradient to be empty (+/- some seconds). In a few cases I've seen bars extend beyond the live point, but that is rare.

I don't think I'm going to make the timeline vertically resizable.

But I will probably add tiny vertical lines on the colored bars to show which colors were alerted. That is something Blue Iris does in the local console. I personally don't like it for the visual noise it creates in a motion-triggered-recording setup, which is why it will be optional once I add that capability.
Click to expand...

Makes sense, thanks. I'm sure many people don't know or appreciate the amount of effort you put into it, myself included. :)

Donation link:

www.paypal.com

Pay Brian Pearce using PayPal.Me

Go to paypal.me/bp2008 and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
www.paypal.com www.paypal.com
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns, sebastiantombs, fenderman and 1 other person
MrRobinHood said:
My timeline seems to go into the future though! Not sure how that works?

Did we also get minority report style future crime recording with this update?

View attachment 121900
Click to expand...

It is probably a bug in the timeline data that BI reported to UI3. We've only tested it on a few systems so far. I will mention it to Ken.
 
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns, sebastiantombs and MrRobinHood
The current time at the top is cut off...what time does it read and what is, in fact, the current time when the screenshot was made?
 
TonyR said:
The current time at the top is cut off...what time does it read and what is, in fact, the current time when the screenshot was made?
Click to expand...
1647260706944.png

Don't remember what time that was, probably right before I posted it, here it is with the time. Not a big deal to me, just posted that it was doing it on one camera here.
 
What I'm saying is that by what you said in your first post ( "I have one camera that is going into the future") and by what is shown in either image that it's not clear, at least to me, what it is you're saying. Maybe I need another cup of coffee. :idk:
 
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
The brown line is one camera and it seems to think it's got recordings out past the blue line which is the current time.

Unless I'm seeing it wrong, which is always a possibility! :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: TonyR
tward392 said:
The brown line is one camera and it seems to think it's got recordings out past the blue line which is the current time.

Unless I'm seeing it wrong, which is always a possibility! :)
Click to expand...
Oh, I see it now.....guess I did need that second cup of coffee. It didn't jump out at me, maybe because I have no cams with a brown color band...or maybe because I'm an old fart. Either way, it seems you're correct.

Play the video so you can see what the weather will be like tomorrow! :lol:
 
  • Like
  • Haha
Reactions: looney2ns, sebastiantombs and Ssayer
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom