Dahua Mini Dome Green Line bottom screen when using H.265

[cybernetics1d]

Hey guys,

I have an issue and hoping someone has seen this before and know of a fix. I converted to Blue Iris a month ago and still in process of tuning and figuring things out with this new system. I'm using a Optiplex 3420 with i7-6700 and Intel HD Graphics 530, which from what I researched should support both H.264 and H.265 decoding.

One of the issue I'm running into is with one of the mini dome i'm using at front door. When I was using H.265 with HA acceleration in Blue Iris, I notice there's a green line at bottom of the image. The recording looks fine and in the camera status tab in Blue Iris, I see "I" indicating hardware acceleration is working as it should. If I switch over to using H.264 with this camera, then the green bar goes away. However, when I look in BI status and then under Log, it shows HW VA not compatible: xxxx. This xxxx seems to be random numbers and different whenever I tried to change different settings in the camera and then re-enable the camera gain while using H.264 codec. Then if I look again in the Status tab for this camera, it states "I" indicating hardware acceleration is working as it should for H.264. I can confirm that it's H.264 working when I look in the Task Manager and notice the GPU usage would increase whenever I full screen this camera. So should I be concerned about BI generate HW VA not compatible xxx logging? I'm unable to find what these numbers in the message mean other than it's indicating hardware acceleration is not working or something with this camera when using H.264.

On that note, I'm curious for those of you with later 6th gen processor with H.265 support, are you using H.265 or stick with H.264? I've read a numerous comments on this forum in the past thread that seem to indicate H.264 seems to offer best quality picture when it comes to Dahua camera. I'm still evaluating whether to switch to H.264 with this mini dome, 5442 and T3241-ZAS in key areas where I'm currently running them with 20 fps and 8192 bitrate using H.265.

 

[wittaj]

With recent versions of BI, many folks have seen trouble with HW acceleration. Now that BI accepts substreams, the use of HA isn't as critical as it was before. So many folks now do not use HA. It is a low %CPU savings now with the substream option.

Make sure you do not have any letters or + after H265. Also make sure no codec is selected. Also make sure that the coding and FPS/Iframe is the same for the mainstream and substream. Sometimes that green line happens because mainstream is one codec and the substream is a different one.

If none of these work and you are still having problems with H265, then just go to H264.

Many have found that H264 produces a better image and the storage savings for some isn't significant. In my case it was literally minutes.

As always, YMMV.

 

[cybernetics1d]

Thanks for the quick response @wittaj . I'm definitely using substream now with all the camera and my CPU usage on average is only between 15-20%. I'm also matching iframe and fps without using any smart or AI codec.

Your comments about "use of HA isn't as critical as it was before" is really intriguing since I've been reading various guides including the substream guide here on this forum and various posts around here. My impression and I always thought one would want to use HA to minimize CPU usage over regardless, but maybe I'm just overanalyzing this? Essentially, I'm just looking at balance between CPU and still maintain best picture quality possible with the Dahua OEM cams including 4MP 5442 and 2MP 3241 I got along with some 4k Lorex ones that doesn't support H.264 so they will be using HA for sure. I'm sure you and the other members here already analyzed the 5442s and other various other low-light Dahua cameras. So do you and others here simply stick with H.264 with high bitrate and forgo the HA with built-in Intel GPU? Or it just depend on the camera and personal preference? I'm just curious and wanted to understand your logical choice.

 

[wittaj]

Personally I haven't seen a big CPU improvement with HA since the substream feature came out. Before substreams, absolutely it was a must.

Several of my cams still use HA, but the moment they start going wonky (usually after a BI update), I simply turn it off.

Some here can run all their cams with the latest BI version and HA no problem, while others have had issues. So many variables with everyone's system.

So my recommendation is run HA until it becomes a problem and then turn it off on the problematic cameras.

Keep in mind if you decide to use H265, you do not need HA.

A lot of folks here see an improvement with H264 versus H265. The macroblocking of H265 can be problematic in some fields of view. YMMV.

 

[cybernetics1d]

It's interesting that you said HA is not really needed even with H265 since we're using substream. Last night, out of curiosity, I went ahead and disable HA globally in BI. I monitor the CPU utilization of the BI app itself in Task Manager and literally didn't notice any CPU utilization differences before and after. Afterward, I went into and only enable HA for specific Lorex cams running H265 and only noticed possibly 1-2% cpu drop on average in overall CPU utilization with BI app itself. The only time CPU would spike 20-30% is only when I open the individual camera full screen, which would make sense since it would to Mainstream when we do. It seems to me then HA is really is not a critical need anymore unless one you have at least 15-20 cams and many of them are 4K with high bitrate or something. For me, I think I'm going to stick with H264 for any non-4K cams and disable HA until I see need for it with BI.