Blurry Images with Reolink

Tim Clark

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Ok. Makes sense. IM a systems/vmware guy trying to get into security work. I will learn. Thanks for all the tips guys. I do like the reolink software. Its very easy to setup but has almost no features for remote vieweing web. Is it possible to take an entire DVR and stream it to BI?
 

josalamanca007

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Tim, if 6 out of the 8 cameras are working correctly. One quick test would be to take one of the working cameras to the location where you have issues.
 

Tim Clark

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No its every single one at the remote location. (4) just two of them do it much worse. Sorry for the confusion. But like I said, its crystal clear/perfect from the reolink.
 

nayr

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could there be any sort of cabling/network issue with those 4 cameras? are they managed poe switches? if so login and check those 4 and see if the error counter has picked up anything.

streaming via udp is not tolerant of any network faults..
 

josalamanca007

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Tim, for a 25Mbps connection your bitrate is too high. Just for testing, change your bitrate to something like 1024 on all 4 remote cameras. Start increasing it till you find your sweet spot, is the 25 Mbps pipe also used for other purposes other than the cameras?

During my testing I was uploading Video Alerts out of my BI to the cloud through a 30Mbps pipe, it always lagged behind. 30Mbps is not a whole lot in the video world.

My current setup (10 cameras, different bitrates and resolutions) are feeding between 85 to 90 Mbps into BI.
 

rnatalli

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I have Reolinks and they work fine in BI setup. They also work fine in Milestone. It's a real disappointment Reolink won't add iframe adjustments to their firmware, but here are a few things you can try:

Cameras' Interface
1. Make sure the Reolinks are using the most recent firmware released recently.
2. Make sure the Reolinks are set to use "Baseline" in the H.264 profile setting.
3. Turn off 3D-NR.
4. Reboot the cameras.

Blue Iris
1. Set Intel hardware acceleration to "No" in the global settings.
2. Uncheck RTSP/stream timecode in each camera's video settings.
3. Raise the buffer to 20MB in each camera's video settings.

I find running the cameras at the maximum resolution of 1440P and a bit rate of 4096 results in a stable stream with BI after the above steps have been performed. I also pull the substream into BI for use with the web server.
 

fenderman

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Using baseline and no hardware acceleration is not a proper solution. You lose image quality and have higher CPU usage. There's no reason to pull the substream for the web server the web server can stream any bitrate you wish
 

rnatalli

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Although the image quality does suffer from an actual 3.7MP, I find it's on par with my Hik 3MP image. I also didn't find the CPU usage prohibited; my 2 Reolinks running at 1440P and 10fps comes in around 22% give or take. As for the web server, I find just changing the bitrate while pulling the main stream results in choppiness when I pull it to a tablet so the easiest solution was to pull the substream running at 720p as the impact on performance was negligible.
 

fenderman

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Although the image quality does suffer from an actual 3.7MP, I find it's on par with my Hik 3MP image. I also didn't find the CPU usage prohibited; my 2 Reolinks running at 1440P and 10fps comes in around 22% give or take. As for the web server, I find just changing the bitrate while pulling the main stream results in choppiness when I pull it to a tablet so the easiest solution was to pull the substream running at 720p as the impact on performance was negligible.
The point is you place limitations on the camera and blue iris. CPU usage is lowered by an average of 1/3 using hardware acceleration. Not everyone has only 2 cams...it makes a huge difference.
You have something set wrong if you are seeing choppiness in the webserver. The webserver and the option to adjust to one of 3 preset bitrates is one of the best features of blue iris.

Bottom line is this. Reolink is falsely advertising blue iris compatibility. Their cameras are subpar and no one should be buying them. The come to this forum and LIE about not knowing what the issue may be. Then the LIE in their twitter post about not adding iframe interval settings because it might cause problems for some users.
 

rnatalli

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The point is you place limitations on the camera and blue iris. CPU usage is lowered by an average of 1/3 using hardware acceleration. Not everyone has only 2 cams...it makes a huge difference.
You have something set wrong if you are seeing choppiness in the webserver. The webserver and the option to adjust to one of 3 preset bitrates is one of the best features of blue iris.
Assuming of course the CPU supports hardware acceleration. I'm actually running 3 cameras; 2 at 3.7MP (Reolink) and 1 at 3MP (Hikvision) on a very modest CPU and the usage is decent without hardware acceleration enabled. I understand that with more cameras this becomes a major factor, but it's worth a shot in the OP's case as there's nothing to lose by trying it. If it works and the PQ is fine, I don't see a problem and may save the OP a lot of time and face reinstalling cameras. You're right that Reolink shouldn't advertise Blue Iris compatibility until they add iframe which would likely solve most issues. Another option for the OP of course is to simply use other client software like Milestone. Interestingly, my setup running on Milestone uses nearly half the resources of BI somehow and that's without running the Reolinks in Baseline profile. But that software

The webserver issue I'm seeing has to do with the client side for whatever reason and regardless of settings at the server. Pulling main streams to anything else works fine, but to this one particular tablet, only pulling the substream works well with the particular software I'm using. Very bizarre, but one of those technological gremlins we sometimes encounter.
 
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chaycock

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I'm curious about something...if the issue with the ReoLinks is that the iframe interval is long and cannot be adjusted, what is it that the ReoLink viewing client is doing to avoid the problem that BI is having? I'm not defending ReoLink in any way, I'm just trying to understand what is different between their client (which a lot of people say works perfectly) and BI which seems to have a lot of problems with the ReoLink cameras.
 

fenderman

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I'm curious about something...if the issue with the ReoLinks is that the iframe interval is long and cannot be adjusted, what is it that the ReoLink viewing client is doing to avoid the problem that BI is having? I'm not defending ReoLink in any way, I'm just trying to understand what is different between their client (which a lot of people say works perfectly) and BI which seems to have a lot of problems with the ReoLink cameras.
The client does not use rtsp/onvif protocols that all third party software must use.
 

chaycock

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Interesting...so they are using some proprietary protocol?
 

dastrix

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So, have they added iframes, ive got a 420 before I brought 5 of the 5231 Dahua. These Reolinks are not half as good.
 

fenderman

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So, have they added iframes, ive got a 420 before I brought 5 of the 5231 Dahua. These Reolinks are not half as good.
good to know the pressure we placed on them worked...
 

chaycock

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Was he asking if they have added iframes or stating that they did? I read it as he was asking since he said "have they added". Also, I have not seen any other posts mentioning that they have been added.
 

chaycock

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Yeah, I had to re-read it a couple of times myself...my wishful thinking thought it said "so they have"....lol
 
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