Blue Iris UI3

[hikky_b]

Where can I find the url parameters documentation for the livestream.htm entry point? I found them for ui3.htm, but they do not seem to work with livestream.htm
I am wanting to be able to start livestream with the following conditions:

1) Specify a group or camera name
2) Have it start without having to press the big Play button that shows up in the middle of the screen

Also, does livestream.htm require a logged in session, or can it work without having to login?

I'm asking about this because I want to put a small tablet by the front door that continually displays a group, and since non-computer types will be using it, I want to keep it as simple as possible, such as not requiring a login.

why are you trying to use livestream.htm?

I use ui3 with url parameters to display groups on various devices.

You can change the authentication settings in your BI console to only authenticate non-lan connections.

Something like this would then open a specific group, full screen:

http://192.168.X.X:81/ui3.htm?group=your_group_name&maximize=1

 

[chaycock]

why are you trying to use livestream.htm?

I use ui3 with url parameters to display groups on various devices.

You can change the authentication settings in your BI console to only authenticate non-lan connections.

Something like this would then open a specific group, full screen:

http://192.168.X.X:81/ui3.htm?group=your_group_name&maximize=1

I stumbled upon livestream by looking at the webroot, and tried it out in the browser and it seemed to be what I wanted minus my questions.
However, what you have seems to fill the bill, so I will use that.
Thank you for your help!

btw...what is livestream used for since it appears ui3 works as well?

 

[bp2008]

Where can I find the url parameters documentation for the livestream.htm entry point? I found them for ui3.htm, but they do not seem to work with livestream.htm
I am wanting to be able to start livestream with the following conditions:

1) Specify a group or camera name
2) Have it start without having to press the big Play button that shows up in the middle of the screen

Also, does livestream.htm require a logged in session, or can it work without having to login?

I'm asking about this because I want to put a small tablet by the front door that continually displays a group, and since non-computer types will be using it, I want to keep it as simple as possible, such as not requiring a login.

The documentation for livestream.htm is only within the page source. Here's a copy.

=========================================================================
Welcome to livestream.htm
Supported URL parameters:
* cam=short     -- Select camera or group with [short] name
* autoplay=0    -- Disables autoplay.
* audio=1       -- Unmute at startup. May cause browser to disable autoplay.
* mode=2        -- Hide video player controls
* mode=3        -- Use browser's standard video player controls
=========================================================================

It has the same login requirements as UI3.

btw...what is livestream used for since it appears ui3 works as well?

If you had a lot of devices viewing the same thing, then livestream.htm should have lower demand on the Blue Iris server's CPU. Other than that, there's not really much benefit and the video delay is a lot higher.

 

[Philip Gonzales]

Getting the following error in ui3 when I full screen a specific camera (Live View) from a Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 (SM-X200).

Error: PIPELINE_ERROR_DECODE: MEDIA_ERR_DECODE

Current H.264 player is HTML5. I tried the other options and no success for this specific camera. If I set the streaming quality to 480P it will work.

Tested on my Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra (SM-S918U) which runs the same version of Android and Google Chrome and I don't face this error on my phone.

Any ideas on if I can resolve this besides setting the streaming quality to 480?

 

[bp2008]

Any ideas on if I can resolve this besides setting the streaming quality to 480?

Sorry, nope. My suggestion would have been trying the other H.264 player options, but you already did that.

 

[Sybertiger]

I installed the latest version of UI3 (from v215 to v259) in hopes of resolving my Samsung TV browser issue I'm having with UI3. Not sure what changed over the last couple of years (not my TV). UI3 used to work fine on the TV browser then one day I started seeing flashing error messages like in the following video. I suspect that maybe in started after I upgraded from BI 4 to Bi 5 and along with BI 5 the UI3 updated. Just a guess.

https://ipcamtalk.com/data/video/176/176996-651925c6a0751b9164b0fbd1f2333146.mp4

Anyhow, I was fooling around with the browser with UI3 v215 and reset it then started getting "indexOf" errors so I upgraded to v259 and still got the errors. Anyone have any idea of what the "indexOf" complaint is? Any setting within UI3 that I can play with to fix this? I understand that UI3 works best with Chrome but I'm stuck with the Samsung browser and didn't want to buy a Firestick just for UI3. Like I said....UI3 used to work fine. I know there are other members on here using the Samsung browser on their smart TVs but maybe they have a newer version but unfortunately my 3 year old TV will not allow me to update to a newer version if one exists.

 

[bp2008]

@Sybertiger Wow, TV browsers do some weird stuff. Which is not really surprising because they are usually based on very old forks of chromium and are buggy and not kept up to date. It is a small miracle they work at all.

Based on the video with the rapid errors you showed, I've made a tweak to audio context diposal that should (in theory) prevent that issue from happening again.

The indexOf error message includes a line number which indicates the true problem is the HTML5 video element raised an error event, but did not provide the error message in the field that is defined in the HTML5 spec. So when UI3 tried to use the string function indexOf on the error message, it failed because the error message string doesn't exist. Well now UI3 will substitute in a placeholder error message [player.error.message unavailable] in this case so it won't crash in the same way. But you will still likely get a failure, we just won't know why it failed. You probably need to try changing UI3's H.264 player to the JavaScript player in order to completely bypass the broken component. If it lags, then limit the streaming quality to a low resolution to compensate for the inefficiency of the JavaScript player.

As for the last screenshot showing the URL, that is also strange because it should not be showing the text & in the address bar. That should just be & but for some reason the text got HTML-encoded by the web browser. Probably just another weird browser bug. Hopefully a benign one.

The changes are in UI3-260. Please try and see if you get better results.

ALSO, if you're using the "direct to wire" streaming function, turn that off. It could cause compatibility issues especially with weird devices like a TV. But it wouldn't affect a group stream showing multiple cameras, so I'm not sure it is related here.

 

[Sybertiger]

@bp2008 Thank you, I do appreciate the patch! I am up and running again on the Samsung TV.

Yes, I did need to change the H.264 player to Java and I did need to lower the resolution to 2MP as 4MP was a slightly laggy. I don't have direct-to-wire as my BI 5 is version 5.5.7.11 (still using DeepStack) which is right before direct-to-wire was added.

 

[EyeOfSauron]

@bp2008 is there any possibility of making UI3 working with reverse proxy authentication?

I have a reverse proxy that sits in front of my apps and it forwards unauthenticated requests to an authentication server, and then redirects back the request to the app with a number of headers, including the username, email, user's groups, etc. The goal here is SSO for all apps.

I already enabled basic auth in Blue Iris, but when I enable proxy auth in front of UI3, I still get the Basic Auth prompt.

Just curious how much of this is controlled/influenced by UI3, or whether we're at the mercy of BI to implement?

edit: I see this was asked here already. Seems auth is server side from BI and they would have to implement the option to "trust" the header sent from the proxy.

edit2: Looking through some github issues for the Home Assistant integration, I got it to work. There is a seemingly unrelated option that makes the proxy auth work!

Simply check this under the Web Server options (and of course have your reverse proxy configured properly).


edit3: Ehh, seems like I got ahead of myself and there was some session caching going on despite logging off. I still get the basic auth prompt from BI after logging in via the proxy. I contacted support and will share any knowledge I might gain from that.

 

[rdxny]

@bp2008 Thank you, I do appreciate the patch! I am up and running again on the Samsung TV.

Yes, I did need to change the H.264 player to Java and I did need to lower the resolution to 2MP as 4MP was a slightly laggy. I don't have direct-to-wire as my BI 5 is version 5.5.7.11 (still using DeepStack) which is right before direct-to-wire was added.

I'm trying to do the same with my (also older) Samsung TV... using the UI3 v 260, it starts to load UI3 but stalls "loading h264". I can't select the settings or options to change to Java or change the res... those options are grayed out as it is still trying to load H264. Did you see that and find a way to fix that? BI v 5.8.0.16, no direct to wire enabled... Thanks...

 

[Sybertiger]

I'm trying to do the same with my (also older) Samsung TV... using the UI3 v 260, it starts to load UI3 but stalls "loading h264". I can't select the settings or options to change to Java or change the res... those options are grayed out as it is still trying to load H264. Did you see that and find a way to fix that? BI v 5.8.0.16, no direct to wire enabled... Thanks...

Did you install the updated UI3 version 260 into your Blue Iris directory yet?

 

[rdxny]

Did you install the updated UI3 version 260 into your Blue Iris directory yet?

View attachment 179509

yes, v 260 loaded...

 

[Sybertiger]

yes, v 260 loaded...View attachment 179511

With UI3 open in the Samsung browser on your TV you should be able to go into the setting of UI3 to change the H.264 player to Java. For me it was a little tedious trying to get into the settings since I had all these flashing red error messages but with patience and quick clicking I was able to get in and change the player.

 

[rdxny]

With UI3 open in the Samsung browser on your TV you should be able to go into the setting of UI3 to change the H.264 player to Java. For me it was a little tedious trying to get into the settings since I had all these flashing red error messages but with patience and quick clicking I was able to get in and change the player.

same here, but after the red errors went away, I still cannot get the settings to open... just grayed out and loading h264 spinning in the display... can't get past that. I was hoping there was something I could put into the web address or something that would force Java...

 

[bp2008]

@bp2008 is there any possibility of making UI3 working with reverse proxy authentication?

edit3: Ehh, seems like I got ahead of myself and there was some session caching going on despite logging off. I still get the basic auth prompt from BI after logging in via the proxy. I contacted support and will share any knowledge I might gain from that.

As you've perhaps discovered, it is entirely out of my hands.

If you want your proxy server to handle the authentication, then I recommend you disable Blue Iris's authentication requirement ("Require from:" "No connections") and use Windows firewall to ensure that BI's web server can only be accessed via the reverse proxy server. You'll still be able to log in to UI3 with an admin session if you want, it will just give you an anonymous session by default.

As an alternative, something you could try is to whitelist the proxy server's IP by putting it in the "Limit acces by IP address" box after a ^ character which tells blue iris that connections coming from that IP should automatically get an administrator session.



You'd need to turn OFF the X-Forwarded-For header checkbox for that to work of course.

I'm trying to do the same with my (also older) Samsung TV... using the UI3 v 260, it starts to load UI3 but stalls "loading h264". I can't select the settings or options to change to Java or change the res... those options are grayed out as it is still trying to load H264. Did you see that and find a way to fix that? BI v 5.8.0.16, no direct to wire enabled... Thanks...

There is probably no way at the moment. I'll make a note to make the settings panel accessible if the loading procedure stalls. Probably I'll add a little button to the bottom of the loading status box after a few seconds.

With UI3 open in the Samsung browser on your TV you should be able to go into the setting of UI3 to change the H.264 player to Java. For me it was a little tedious trying to get into the settings since I had all these flashing red error messages but with patience and quick clicking I was able to get in and change the player.

It has been months since I configured the red error messages to not overlap the top bar where the hamburger menu is, and to appear behind the settings panel. How were they interfering?

 

[rdxny]

As you've perhaps discovered, it is entirely out of my hands.

If you want your proxy server to handle the authentication, then I recommend you disable Blue Iris's authentication requirement ("Require from:" "No connections") and use Windows firewall to ensure that BI's web server can only be accessed via the reverse proxy server. You'll still be able to log in to UI3 with an admin session if you want, it will just give you an anonymous session by default.

As an alternative, something you could try is to whitelist the proxy server's IP by putting it in the "Limit acces by IP address" box after a ^ character which tells blue iris that connections coming from that IP should automatically get an administrator session.

View attachment 179572

You'd need to turn OFF the X-Forwarded-For header checkbox for that to work of course.






There is probably no way at the moment. I'll make a note to make the settings panel accessible if the loading procedure stalls. Probably I'll add a little button to the bottom of the loading status box after a few seconds.



It has been months since I configured the red error messages to not overlap the top bar where the hamburger menu is, and to appear behind the settings panel. How were they interfering?

Thanks.. the red boxes do block the hamburger briefly (attached pic) but they go away if you wait. But the hamburger is still inactive, and "loading H264 player" is "busy"

 

[bp2008]

Thanks.. the red boxes do block the hamburger briefly (attached pic) but they go away if you wait. But the hamburger is still inactive, and "loading H264 player" is "busy"View attachment 179577

Must be just due to the age of the browser, it doesn't adhere to web standards like the newer ones do...

 

[rdxny]

Must be just due to the age of the browser, it doesn't adhere to web standards like the newer ones do...

agreed. Expensive Samsung TV is half obsolete in 3 or 4 years... can't do half of the current stream options. If you can make it work, great, if not, no biggie Thanks!

 

[bp2008]

@rdxny If you manually install UI3-262, I've added a button to open UI Settings. It should appear after about 3 seconds.



If you need instructions to manually install UI3, they are here in the ui3 github repository's readme document.

 

[rdxny]

@rdxny If you manually install UI3-262, I've added a button to open UI Settings. It should appear after about 3 seconds.

View attachment 179592

If you need instructions to manually install UI3, they are here in the ui3 github repository's readme document.

I loaded v 262, but no extra button appears (yes, v 262 shows in my normal browser, so update was ok.)... I'm afraid the samsung browser is just messed up! Thanks for trying! (btw, everything after "loading h264 player" is also "busy", not "OK", if that matters.