Blue Iris UI3

[bp2008]

Thanks.
Reviewed json request suggested. Both under 100ms. Local LAN 9.41ms + VPN 48.44ms. (Calendar for default "All cameras" group)
HOWEVER - Feel stupid now for not discovering by now that this issue is only happening on the default "All Cameras" group.
We have 4 custom groups for staff live view use but I never use them. Our custom groups showing proper red dots.

All our cameras continuously record 24/7 with two exceptions. 1 camera records mainstream day + only substream at night w/ mainstream trigger. 2nd camera only records substream during day, no record at night. However if I select either of these two cams individually and review calendar both have red dots present everyday.
Perhaps with the issue narrowed down to "all cameras" group BI support would investigate.
Any ideas?

Yes that should be helpful information to BI Support. If I was them, I might want to know if any individual camera has a problem delivering the red dots on the calendar. It could be that a single camera with a problem is causing the issue for all of them when queried together.

 

[tomgru]

My search foo must suck, because I can't find a thing in the help files or online regarding the Picture-in-Picture feature in UI3. When i try it, i get the same picture in both frames. How do i set this up?

 

[looney2ns]

My search foo must suck, because I can't find a thing in the help files or online regarding the Picture-in-Picture feature in UI3. When i try it, i get the same picture in both frames. How do i set this up?

Select the camera group or camera you want to view. Then at the bottom right corner of the frame, hoover the mouse over all the icons there, and it will show you the button to click to open pip.

 

[bp2008]

There's nothing to set up. The default configuration has the button enabled, and when you click the button the browser should show the video in a separate window. You may or may not also see the video in the main browser window depending on whether you are zoomed in or not.

There are some requirements to be able to see the picture-in-picture button.

• The web browser and operating system must support picture-in-picture video playback.
• The Picture-in-Picture button must be enabled in UI3's settings (it is by default).
• The H.264 player must be "HTML5" in UI3's settings. The default is "Automatic" which internally maps to "HTML5" on most platforms.

 

[tomgru]

@bp2008 ... thanks, i totally misunderstood this. when I tried it, it the PiP overlay box came up on top of the browser showing UI3, so I thought it "was inside" that browser instance, if that makes sense?

Now I see you can actually drag it to anywhere on your screen. Handy and cool.

Thanks.

 

[CNCCF]

Having a latency issue that seems to only be with UI3 and not sure how to track it down...

Been using BI for probably 10 years or so, had some bugs with UI2/3 early on, but since about 3 years ago it has been near flawless for me. Around 6 months ago I started occasionally getting the yellow delay symbol in the top right and after a while it would reload the page and work for another hour or so before doing it again. Three months ago it got really bad and would do it nearly every minute. BI was on an older E5v2 CPU system running in VMware, figured it was due time to upgrade anyways so I'm now on 13th gen Intel on Proxmox with 10gbe. Ran great for the past three months and suddenly started doing it again this week. I'm really bad about staying on top of updates... so I ran all my updates and its still happening about once a minute, but I hadn't been in the server for at least two weeks before it suddenly started the delay issue again.

It seems to be a network bandwidth issue, as it will run without delay when set to 360p, but any higher and the issue returns. I tried going to UI3 from a VM on the same host with the same issue, but if I go to UI3 from the VM running BI it runs just fine, so basically anything leaving the VM has the issue. Now the confusing part is speed tests between VMs will pull near 10gbps, and between a physical PC and that VM will do 2.5gbe. Task manager shows ~20 mbps traffic when running normally and CPU sits around 10% so I don't think the host is anywhere near overwhelmed. Happens on any of my cameras, even the main page that shows them all which is set for substreams, although much less often on that main page than camera pages. I've played with a bunch of encoder settings in the advanced tab and it doesn't make a difference.

Best I can remember I have not made any firewall/network/Proxmox changes in the timeframe where it went from working to lagging, and nothing else on my network is having any issues. I killed my Home Assistant integration in case that was doing something, but I can't think of anything else on the network that would interact with BI. I've disabled the Windows Firewall breifly, checked my Unifi settings for any port conflicts, bandwidth restrictions, etc. just not sure what else to look at.

Thanks.

 

[bp2008]

Having a latency issue that seems to only be with UI3 and not sure how to track it down...

Been using BI for probably 10 years or so, had some bugs with UI2/3 early on, but since about 3 years ago it has been near flawless for me. Around 6 months ago I started occasionally getting the yellow delay symbol in the top right and after a while it would reload the page and work for another hour or so before doing it again. Three months ago it got really bad and would do it nearly every minute. BI was on an older E5v2 CPU system running in VMware, figured it was due time to upgrade anyways so I'm now on 13th gen Intel on Proxmox with 10gbe. Ran great for the past three months and suddenly started doing it again this week. I'm really bad about staying on top of updates... so I ran all my updates and its still happening about once a minute, but I hadn't been in the server for at least two weeks before it suddenly started the delay issue again.

It seems to be a network bandwidth issue, as it will run without delay when set to 360p, but any higher and the issue returns. I tried going to UI3 from a VM on the same host with the same issue, but if I go to UI3 from the VM running BI it runs just fine, so basically anything leaving the VM has the issue. Now the confusing part is speed tests between VMs will pull near 10gbps, and between a physical PC and that VM will do 2.5gbe. Task manager shows ~20 mbps traffic when running normally and CPU sits around 10% so I don't think the host is anywhere near overwhelmed. Happens on any of my cameras, even the main page that shows them all which is set for substreams, although much less often on that main page than camera pages. I've played with a bunch of encoder settings in the advanced tab and it doesn't make a difference.

Best I can remember I have not made any firewall/network/Proxmox changes in the timeframe where it went from working to lagging, and nothing else on my network is having any issues. I killed my Home Assistant integration in case that was doing something, but I can't think of anything else on the network that would interact with BI. I've disabled the Windows Firewall breifly, checked my Unifi settings for any port conflicts, bandwidth restrictions, etc. just not sure what else to look at.

Thanks.

This could be tough to figure out. Clicking the orange clock icon should pop up a message explaining where the delay came from, but you can also learn by looking at the "Stats for nerds" panel.

Right click the video in UI3 and open the "Stats for nerds" panel. This will have graphs including Network Delay and Player Delay. If Network Delay grows, it means the video timestamps being fed into UI3 by Blue Iris are not increasing at the expected rate. That would typically be because the network can't handle the stream (usually wifi's fault), but in your case it sounds like your network is fine so I doubt this is the problem. It could also go up due to a major performance problem that is not strictly network related, or due to software bugs.

Player Delay really is just the amount of video that is currently buffered and not yet played and it will heavily correlate with the Delayed Frames graph just below it. If Player Delay grows, that means the device you're running UI3 on is unable to play the video as fast as it comes in.

Also have a look at the FPS meter in the status area of UI3, and see if that meets expectations. The FPS bar should ideally be full, all the way to the right, otherwise it indicates a slowdown of some kind is occurring. A loss of FPS doesn't necessarily mean a delay is happening. Usually it just means Blue Iris is unable to encode all the frames in realtime so it is dropping some in order to avoid letting a delay build up. It is sadly normal for the FPS to be lower than the source video due to Blue Iris transcoding the video in realtime to send it to UI3.

Another data point to look at is to see which H.264 player you're using. Open UI3's main menu > UI Settings > Video Player, and see what the current H.264 player is. On most systems it will be HTML5. Try changing it to another option. JavaScript is the only alternative on most systems, which is substantially more CPU intensive than the HTML5 player, but more reliable as it is much less dependent on the browser, OS, drivers, and video hardware all working properly.

Are you using the "Direct to wire" streaming feature? It can have compatibility problems. It could be helpful to screenshot your Streaming 0 configuration in Blue Iris Settings > Web Server > Advanced.

 

[CNCCF]

This could be tough to figure out. Clicking the orange clock icon should pop up a message explaining where the delay came from, but you can also learn by looking at the "Stats for nerds" panel.

Right click the video in UI3 and open the "Stats for nerds" panel. This will have graphs including Network Delay and Player Delay. If Network Delay grows, it means the video timestamps being fed into UI3 by Blue Iris are not increasing at the expected rate. That would typically be because the network can't handle the stream (usually wifi's fault), but in your case it sounds like your network is fine so I doubt this is the problem. It could also go up due to a major performance problem that is not strictly network related, or due to software bugs.

Player Delay really is just the amount of video that is currently buffered and not yet played and it will heavily correlate with the Delayed Frames graph just below it. If Player Delay grows, that means the device you're running UI3 on is unable to play the video as fast as it comes in.

Also have a look at the FPS meter in the status area of UI3, and see if that meets expectations. The FPS bar should ideally be full, all the way to the right, otherwise it indicates a slowdown of some kind is occurring. A loss of FPS doesn't necessarily mean a delay is happening. Usually it just means Blue Iris is unable to encode all the frames in realtime so it is dropping some in order to avoid letting a delay build up. It is sadly normal for the FPS to be lower than the source video due to Blue Iris transcoding the video in realtime to send it to UI3.

Another data point to look at is to see which H.264 player you're using. Open UI3's main menu > UI Settings > Video Player, and see what the current H.264 player is. On most systems it will be HTML5. Try changing it to another option. JavaScript is the only alternative on most systems, which is substantially more CPU intensive than the HTML5 player, but more reliable as it is much less dependent on the browser, OS, drivers, and video hardware all working properly.

Are you using the "Direct to wire" streaming feature? It can have compatibility problems. It could be helpful to screenshot your Streaming 0 configuration in Blue Iris Settings > Web Server > Advanced.

I appreciate the quick reply and want to thank you for UI3, its the sole reason I use Blue Iris and so much better than dealing with the NVRs like I used to.

Good to know on clicking the clock icon, never thought about trying that. It says "Your network connection is not fast enough to handle this stream in realtime. Consider changing the streaming quality."

I feel kind of silly never noticing the Stats for Nerds option there either. Player delay and delayed frames are both low, but network delay constantly ramps up.

The FPS meter jumps around and drops to 0 or 1 when the delay starts, sits at 19-20 when working correctly.

I had the H.264 player set on Automatic, and trying HTML5, Javascript, and Web Codecs all had the issue. If it means anything Web Codecs stayed on the substream for near 5 seconds before switching where Javascript and HTML5 both switched from sub to main streams in half a second or so.

I was not using Direct to wire, but when I was playing with the encoding settings I tried it on and didn't notice a difference.

In my testing of settings I hit Use defaults on the Steaming 0 configurations to see what would change as I have no idea what I've changed over the years, screenshot the default settings, clicked cancel, and reopened to see what my settings where... but it appears clicking Use default immediately applies the default settings, so I honestly don't know what I've been on all the time, but I'm now back at defaults and the issue remains. I have since changed it to Intel QSV as I know I had that selected previously, but I didn't catch what all else changed so everything else should be default. Here is what it is at now:



I've been meaning to sit down and subnet my network out to break all the IOT things off into their own subnet for a while now, so I'm going to work on that this weekend incase it is something on my network causing the issue, will be easy enough to move the BI VM between each subnet and see if it happens on one and not the other. The other thing that just hit me is I started using Docker Wyze Bridge around the time it started happening, so I'll disable that the next time I catch it delaying and see if there is a change.

 

[bp2008]

If it means anything Web Codecs stayed on the substream for near 5 seconds before switching where Javascript and HTML5 both switched from sub to main streams in half a second or so.

Nope, the sub/main stream switching happens entirely within Blue Iris and is not affected by your choice of H.264 player.

I have since changed it to Intel QSV

I don't think Intel QSV has ever worked for hardware encoding. It just fails and falls back to software encoding. You might as well not have it selected.


If you have WebCodecs available, you probably are using a reverse proxy server to provide HTTPS. A proxy server that buffers data unpredictably could cause a problem like this. Try connecting directly to Blue Iris's web server to see if it makes a difference. Some security software has also been known to interfere with UI3 streaming. Sophos I believe it was. But I haven't heard of that causing an issue in years now.

Consider opening UI3 in an incognito/private window so that it is running entirely with default settings, in case you made some bad settings changes in the normal config.

 

[CNCCF]

Nope, the sub/main stream switching happens entirely within Blue Iris and is not affected by your choice of H.264 player.

I don't think Intel QSV has ever worked for hardware encoding. It just fails and falls back to software encoding. You might as well not have it selected.

If you have WebCodecs available, you probably are using a reverse proxy server to provide HTTPS. A proxy server that buffers data unpredictably could cause a problem like this. Try connecting directly to Blue Iris's web server to see if it makes a difference. Some security software has also been known to interfere with UI3 streaming. Sophos I believe it was. But I haven't heard of that causing an issue in years now.

Consider opening UI3 in an incognito/private window so that it is running entirely with default settings, in case you made some bad settings changes in the normal config.

Good to know on QSV.

I am using NGINX for reverse proxy, and sure as heck if I connect to it by local IP instead of hostname there is no delay... also lines up that around the time of the original issue is when I switched from NGINX on debian over to NGINX Proxy Manager in Docker so I'm willing to bet there is something in the config rate limiting it. Either way, its definitely the issue and I feel kinda dumb not realizing this. I really appreciate the help!

 

[bp2008]

I've used nginx proxy manager. Nice in concept, but it does a few little things I don't like, such as responding inappropriately to requests to the IP that did not specify one of the configured hostnames (it sends back a self-signed certificate which some security scanners will complain about). I've actually been building my own little substitute for nginx proxy manager, and opted to implement the entire proxy service backend myself instead of using nginx. I am sure my approach is inferior in features and efficiency, but it gets the job done and it is easy for me to add features that I need.

 

[actran]

@bp2008 Love PTZ enhancement in v251. Thanks!

 

[bdf0506]

Is there a way to change the behavior when you click on a video during playback in the Timeline view? One thing that has been driving me crazy is that when you are viewing a clip in the Clips view, and you click the left mouse button, it will pause a clip, but if you do this on the Timeline view, it will bring you back to all cameras (though at the same point in the video clip). Is there any enhancement that could change this behavior so that single clicking the mouse button in timeline view will pause it instead?

 

[actran]

Is there a way to change the behavior when you click on a video during playback in the Timeline view? One thing that has been driving me crazy is that when you are viewing a clip in the Clips view, and you click the left mouse button, it will pause a clip, but if you do this on the Timeline view, it will bring you back to all cameras (though at the same point in the video clip). Is there any enhancement that could change this behavior so that single clicking the mouse button in timeline view will pause it instead?

@bdf0506 Just in case you did not know, in Timeline view, use spacebar to pause playback.

I love mouse click to toggle between single camera and group view, at which point I have option to switch to a different camera.

I find keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) are a very fast way to fast forward, reverse playback, step thru frame by frame, etc...

Hotkeys are also configurable by you. Try hotkeys if you haven't used them before.

 

[bp2008]

Is there a way to change the behavior when you click on a video during playback in the Timeline view? One thing that has been driving me crazy is that when you are viewing a clip in the Clips view, and you click the left mouse button, it will pause a clip, but if you do this on the Timeline view, it will bring you back to all cameras (though at the same point in the video clip). Is there any enhancement that could change this behavior so that single clicking the mouse button in timeline view will pause it instead?

Currently that is not possible because there hasn't been demand for it. I've created a github issue to remind me to work on this. Revamp video player click settings · Issue #158 · bp2008/ui3

If I implement that (and I probably will, but I can't say when), it would become possible for you to change what happens when you click or double click (keeping in mind that enabling a double-click action will add a delay to single click actions).

In the meantime I do recommend using the spacebar for play/pause as suggested by @actran.

 

[bjohnrini]

When I click on a camera, it takes a 10-20 seconds for the list of alerts to load. Works fine when using the BI interface. Problem is only when using UI3.
On the latest version. Any ideas?

 

[bp2008]

Hmm. I see. I am running 5.7.8.3 due to an FTP-related bug in 5.7.9.0, and indeed my alert list is very very delayed. Clip list won't load at all most of the time. Unfortunately the delay is simply waiting for Blue Iris to send the response, so there's nothing I can do on my end to fix it.

 

[gwithers]

I am seeing the same thing. Any version after 5.7.8.1 seems to suffer from the slow alert list loading problem (i.e. version 5.7.8.1 loads the alert list quickly and as expected).

 

[bp2008]

If it still happens on the latest version, currently 5.7.9.0, then make sure to tell Blue Iris support. I'm not updating back to 5.7.9.0 as it fails to upload my jpeg stills to FTP properly.

 

[bjohnrini]

If it still happens on the latest version, currently 5.7.9.0, then make sure to tell Blue Iris support. I'm not updating back to 5.7.9.0 as it fails to upload my jpeg stills to FTP properly.

Still happening with 5.7.9.1