Camera feed changes to bright flashing colors

jasauders

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Good morning friends. Hope everyone is well. I have been running into something recently and finally decided to post about it here. For the last few weeks I've noticed every once in a while, seemingly at random, one of my ten cameras will drop off with presenting me its regular feed. Instead it'll be some flashing and randomly changing colors. Here's a screenshot example, though when watching it live it changes frequently.

1593267880897.png

It happens in UI3 and Blue Iris itself on the server. When I open the camera stream directly in its own web interface it does not exhibit these issues. I also happened to have changed out my network switch 3 times. The issue traveled to all 3 different switches (different brands/ages/models entirely). It also doesn't happen on one particular camera as it's happened on different makes/models at random. In total I'd say I have to restart one of my ten cameras every 3 days with one of them surfacing with issues like above.

I can easily restart the camera, and have been, from right within the UI3 interface. I just wanted to see if this may be a sign that I have something not set right. I've had Blue Iris running flawlessly for well over a year and once I had things fine tuned I really didn't touch the settings ever again and this started happening in the last few weeks which made me less suspicious that it was me/a config change I did and more of a possibility that it was a software update, but again, not sure.

When the issue is actively happening, the above screenshot is what I can visually see in real time. If I play back the feed that was recorded at that same time it does not look like the screenshot, but does clearly have some corrupt looking imagery. If a car drives by I'll see a colored blob of the car floating in the air, but it's very degraded and difficult to see. No pink misty clouds though on the recorded portion, just the live portion.

Anyway, if anybody has any ideas or suggestions to try I'd greatly appreciate it.
 

sebastiantombs

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What brand and model of camera? Settings from both the camera config and the BI config might help too. Screen captures, not cell phone pictures.
 

jasauders

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It's a mixture of Hikvision 4MP domes, Hikvision 3MP domes, a Hikvision 3MP turret, and a few Dahua domes. I can get exact model numbers a bit later today.

The split is basically 10 FPS for indoor cameras, 15 FPS for outdoor cameras, all running via H264. Full time recording w/ motion alerts in BI. I also have the outside cameras, despite being 3MP or 4MP, set to 1920x1080. I'm using BVR file format and have direct to disc enabled.

I'm not sure about the reference of "cell phone pictures". The above is a screenshot from my laptop viewing BI's UI3 using a screenshot utility -- just cropped in to the problematic camera frame.

Here are my settings specifically for my 'front' camera, Video and Record tabs. The front camera was also today's issue from the original post with the pink haze this morning.

1593271648069.png1593271675000.png

Hopefully this helps. Thanks for any insight!
 

sebastiantombs

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Have you tried rebooting the camera from the camera GUI? What version of firmware? I'm not a Hikvision user but do have a number of Dahua.
 

jasauders

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I did reboot all of the cameras in the camera GUI. I've also "rebooted" them by remoting to my switch and power cycling the POE ports over VPN (this was before I realized BI has a simple right click >> restart camera option in UI3 -- bit of a durr on my part). That being said, while a full camera reboot "fixes" it for some time, it's a noticeably long reboot. Meanwhile, the 'restart camera' function in UI3/BI is very very fast, which is quite clear to me that the camera is not doing a full blown restart in that case and it must be BI re-establishing that connection. That's why I felt this might be a little more centralized to BI itself.

My Dahua cameras, which constitute most of my exterior dome cameras, are set in firmware to auto reboot once a week as well. That front camera that's been a bit of focus in this thread is a re-branded Dahua camera. If I recall its brand is EyeSurv DM3. It was Nelly's Security re-brand of a popular Dahua dome prior to them dropping their EyeSurv (Dahua) line in favor of the NSC line (which I believe is Hikvision-based).
 

sebastiantombs

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Next step would be a "hard" reset of the offending camera. If that doesn't work, either switch it to another, known good, cable or take it down an bench test it using a known good cable.
 

pozzello

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what's your 'receive buffer' set to in a sample cam's 'video/configure...' page? suggest 10-20MB per cam, if not already.
 

jasauders

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what's your 'receive buffer' set to in a sample cam's 'video/configure...' page? suggest 10-20MB per cam, if not already.
Thanks for the suggestion. I found that my setting was set to 6.0 MB on every camera. I adjusted each to 12 figuring that doubling it might be a safe bet as it doubles what I had + puts me in the 10-20 range you suggested. So far no cameras have drifted into the rainbow looking pink haze view that I was seeing before. Fingers crossed this is all it was. Appreciate the suggestion!
 

robpiat

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Any resolution to this? One by one several of my cameras started doing this. I disabled hardware accelleration and the problem went away but my CPU usage increased. This started after an update a couple months ago impacted a variety of dahua OEM import cameras but not two Hikvisions that I've had awhile.
 

bp2008

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This is something that happens with Intel hardware acceleration sometimes. I haven't been able to narrow it down any further than that. I used to think it only happened with Hikvision cams, but I've seen it on some Dahua too.
 

robpiat

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I changed the buffer to 20MB and same thing happened...Its interesting that it doesn't happen suddenly or all at the same time. Each dahua camera started after a couple hours, 1 every 30 -45 minutes

is it possible it has something to do with drivers, firmware, etc on my PC?
 

bp2008

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@robpiat That is a possibility, certainly.

What I ended up doing on the last system I dealt with this issue on (a few months ago) was to disable hardware acceleration on the cameras that did it persistently, and set up some sub streams to reduce the CPU load.
 

robpiat

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Can you explain the substream like you were talking a 5th grader?
 
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