Frame Skipping

[Scudrunner]

We have been putting in Uniview NVRs for years with no challenges like this whatsoever, but we recently had to upgrade a client's Alibi Witness system to the Alibi Vigilant to be in compliance. The Vigilant is nothing but a Uniview with their logo slapped on the screen.

The unit is running one HD so there are no groups.

On the system are 8 generic/stealth IP cams from Amazon that are indoor, and 8 Alibi Witness outdoor cams. All are now ONVIF since Alibi Witness doesn't play with Alibi Vigilant.

The indoor/generic/Amazon cams work flawlessly. The outdoor Alibi Witness cams are frame skipping, so when watching the on screen clock you see it tick off every two seconds.

This is not bandwidth related as it does the same thing on the LAN, and if I log directly into the Alibi Witness camera and go to Live View all streams smoothly.

On what is probably an unrelated symptom, no matter what I do with the Alibi cameras, they will not stay in sync w/DST, but the cheap generics are fine. I have turned off time sync at the NVR, turned off sync with time server at the cameras, set them to manual, nothing works other than setting the time zone one zone to the east as a temporary fix. It's probably unrelated, but no harm in mentioning it.

I did update the firmware on the NVR, but no joy. Any of you guys fought this one? Thanks in advance.

 

[wittaj]

Not specifically with Uniview, but I had an NVR once do that on a cam with that skipped frame that I had accidentally set to H265+. Once I eliminated the codec, it worked flawlessly.

 

[Scudrunner]

Hmmm. Nothing is set to H.265+, but all the cams (the cheap interiors and the Alibi Witness outside) are set to H.265 as are all channels on the NVR. The interiors work fine. I'd hate to give up the compression, but I may have to give that a try on the outside ones just in case. Thanks.

 

[Scudrunner]

@wittaj if you're ever down Dallas way, I owe you a drink. It's crappy code. That's all I can say.

This morning about 1:30 while I'm lying in bed thinking about this, it occurred to me that Sub Stream didn't frame skip. Bear in mind we have ruled out bandwidth issues. So I'm thinking, maybe Sub Stream is a different protocol. Nope.

So keep in mind that all the stealth motion detector looking camera inside and all of the Alibi Witness line cameras outside have the Codec set for both Main & Sub Stream set to H.265, and at the Alibi Vigilant NVR all channels are set on both Main and Sub Stream to H.265. By changing it at the NVR level on just the Alibi cams to H.264 it cleared the issue. Of course now they lose that compression.

As for the time issue, that's been another crazy one. We finally had to shut off updates and DST, set the NVR to one time zone east and let it push that out to the cameras. Fortunately, those Amazon cams work flawlessly and play well with anything. It's just making Alibi work with Alibi that is the nightmare.

Thanks again for being a sounding board. This is the one system we have that is 1400 miles away that was done for family and it's the one that gives us all the issues.

 

[wittaj]

Glad to help and that that was the issue! This is a great forum and has saved many of us some long troubleshooting methods that end up not working!