Comparing official app and UI3

jasauders

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Hi friends. I've spent the night tinkering with the official Android app and UI3 on a few Android devices. I'm noticing some behaviors that I wanted to kick around on here in case anybody has any ideas or insight.

I enabled audio on 3 of my indoor cameras that act as baby monitors for the youngsters. On the official app my screen often flashes black for half a second. The audio drops out for 20-30 seconds at a time when this happens. I'm also seeing very frequent crashes on the app but my focus has about mostly been on the audio behavior so far.

Meanwhile streaming the cameras in chrome is problem free. No black flashes, no audio skip, everything seems to work entirely fine.

I have 8 cameras set to 480p on live stream and all are 10 fps. Processor on the server hovers around 20-25%.

Curious if anybody is having similar findings. Thank you!
 

fenderman

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Are you certain that you have the official app? There are a few imposters. That should not be happening. The screen does flash but you should not be dropping audio.
 

jasauders

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Yeah, I remember reading about some imposters as well. Pretty certain I have the correct one. This is it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blueirissoftware.blueiris

The reason I noticed it is I have a laptop in my daughter's room that is set up to be fully on autopilot and play a 10 hour relaxing music video track. When I was checking in for the night I kept hearing that track from their bedroom get dropped off with the stream to the nightstand tablet next to me. Thought it was me so I turned the volume way up on the nightstand tablet for it to be more obvious. The intervals of that happening varied. At times it was once every minute, other times once every 3-4 minutes. As mentioned it seemed to be tied to the screen going black for half a second, then silence for a bit.

This particular tablet is a Nexus 10. I'm sure there are more powerful tablets on the market now, but with downclocking the video stream quality to 480p and tracking the network usage, I don't see how it was acting as a heavy hitter. The wireless I use at home is Unifi, and I've been able to throw a shocking amount of devices on the airwaves and the Unifi setup just smiles. (they may come in rather meh with their video, but their wireless line I hold in high regard). At the time nobody was using the wireless... my wife was at work on a night shift even. Everything was idle.

Beyond that, I couldn't help but to think what I was seeing/hearing began and ended within the app itself, particularly given its audio dropping out when the screen flashed and with the app crashing on me. As I was learning the swipe gestures and whatnot when using the app, it wasn't difficult to have it crash. It may be important to note that I never saw the app crash when the audio tanked. The app only crashed when I was actively using it and going through different views. For example I'd bring up front door cam, swipe down to drop to all 8 in one view, then long press the back door cam -- before back door cam would come up, it'd just disappear and I'd be back at the home screen of the tablet. When I was doing actions like that it seemed crash prone, but never "audio dropped off = app crash". Despite there not being a direct correlation between those two items, the crash prone behavior I was seeing just raised an eyebrow.

Anyway, I mostly wanted to just stir up some conversation and see if there was anything to look for or if anybody else were seeing something similar for sake of comparison. If nothing else the UI3 interface on this tablet largely accomplishes the exact same task (just want to view the feeds -- every other feature of the app doesn't hold much value here as I don't take it out with me like I would with my phone), and it does an excellent job. But like I said, figured I'd bring it up and see what shakes out.

Thanks much!

EDIT - It's only been a few minutes but testing now between my phone and the Nexus 10 tablet, it didn't take much testing to take notice that the behavior is nearly identical between the two devices. It seems as if the audio only has trouble when I'm viewing all cameras at once. I have 8 cameras where 3 are indoor cameras with audio enabled. If my audio drops off, selecting one of those three cameras (single camera view) brings it back, and likewise I haven't taken note of it dropping off yet when I'm viewing a single camera. If I bring up the view of all 8 cameras at once it doesn't take long for the audio to drop off, despite being enabled with all volume sliders up.

Is it a little unrealistic to have three simultaneous audio streams coming through at once over the live view with multiple cameras? Anybody else do something similar in their setup? Bear in mind, over UI3 web interface the multiple audio streams running in live view at once didn't seem to have any issues at all, but maybe there's a technical reason since I'm comparing browser vs app.

Thanks again everyone.

EDIT II - Hm, perhaps I spoke a little too soon as more tinkering hasn't yielded exactly identical results between the tablet and phone as I previously suggested. I had the audio cut out on my phone earlier on (moto g5 plus) but for quite a while now I had my phone running with the app without any issues whatsoever. I got to thinking perhaps it was related to the Nexus 10. It's an older tablet but wasn't exactly a slouch upon its release either. Side by side I haven't noticed the black screen flashes on my phone. Tablet happens a lot more (few times per minute). I installed TinyCore to look at CPU usage. Tablet definitely uses more CPU (nearly maxed when running all cams) whereas phone is more like 65-75%. Not sure how conclusive this is, but meh. I think I might be better off sourcing an old laptop to put on my nightstand (which I had done for the longest time before anyway) and using UI3 instead on the laptop as my interest in tablets kind of faded after the Nexus 10 generation so I have nothing else to substitute besides laptops. I'll keep tinkering with the mobile devices but so far my phone was acting much more consistently with the native app than I remember it this morning. Perhaps the coffee hadn't kicked in enough for this user when I was comparing and testing to that caliber? :p Anyway I felt compelled to post another edit since I brought it up.

P.S. - With now focusing more on a laptop viewer I've found that UI3 in Chrome saved as chrome-app with that app-shortcut triggered to auto-start on an auto-login laptop is kind of awesome.
 
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bp2008

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Hey. UI3 developer here. I'm glad to hear it worked well when other stuff did not. :)

For what its worth, when viewing a camera group, Blue Iris mixes all the video and audio streams together so the client app just receives one audio and video stream. As far as the client is concerned it is exactly the same as viewing a single camera.
 

looney2ns

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I have the audio drop outs with the BI app, on my Moto G5plus, it also happened when I had an LgG3.
Sometimes it is linked to the screen refresh, sometimes it's not. Audio at times can be just be plain choppy, along with the video pausing at times. This while on my home wifi.
I emailed Ken about it sometime back, he said he'd look into it, but never heard anymore and I still have the issue 8 months later.

As far as UI3, same here, it works perfectly on the same phone in chrome.
 
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