Difference between UI3 and android app?

[danbutter]

Wondering if there is a difference between UI3 and the android app in the area of video decoding.
So I'm having issue with h.264 video not playing smoothly in UI3 and wondering if the app does anything different from UI3. I assume it uses the same webserver for the source.
I probably just don't have a strong enough BI machine, but I can't stream even on my local network using UI3 without it saying your cpu can't keep keep up. Even on a six core xeon with HT and 32 gig of ram.

So does the app do anything UI3 doesn't?

 

[bp2008]

Hello. I am the developer of UI3. The CPU warning in UI3 is talking about the device you are running UI3 on, and has nothing to do with your Blue Iris server performance.

Wondering if there is a difference between UI3 and the android app in the area of video decoding.

Yes. UI3's video decoder is currently pretty slow. It is Cisco's OpenH264 decoder ported to JavaScript, and it is maybe 40% of the speed of a typical software-based decoder. Weak CPUs like those in old or cheap computers or most mobile devices have trouble keeping up. The Android app has a much more efficient decoder, probably even using hardware acceleration, so it runs circles around UI3 in terms of decoding efficiency.

However that should change with the next Blue Iris update. Just last weekend I implemented a much better decoder that actually uses HTML5's Media Source Extensions to access the browser's native video decoder. It should match or exceed the capabilities of the Android app. Specifically I believe the Android app will crash if you give it video larger than 1080p, but UI3 has no such limit. If you want to get this UI3 update early without waiting for Blue Iris to include it, you can grab it from here: bp2008/ui3 (read the Manual installation part).

 

[danbutter]

Works much better now after the update.
Thanks for your hard work on UI3!