H.264 or H.265? Should Blue Iris And Camera Be The Same?

[XrayDoc88]

I wasn't sure where to post my question since it involves both camera and Blue Iris settings. I had my camera set on H.265. When using BI5 UI3 locally to view live feeds, I was getting some orange clock symbols in the upper right corner of the screen. When clicking these symbols they would either say something like "my video stream was delayed and switch to a different browser" or "my network didn't support the speed necessary for my camera and to change the streaming settings". I got these messages with both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. My network is Gigabit. I changed my camera to H.264 and don't seem to be seeing the orange clock symbol anymore.

I also noticed in UI3 that you have to select a H.264 "video player" such as HTML5 or javascript. Does this mean that UI3 doesn't even support H.265 and that is why I was having viewing issues? I thought it was desirable to use H.265 if your camera supported it and your CPU was fast enough. Please advise what settings you use for camera and UI3? Thanks.

 

[bp2008]

What CPU is in your Blue Iris server, and what kind of hardware accelerated decoding did you have configured in Blue Iris for that camera? What resolution and frame rate is the camera?

H.265 in theory takes a little more time to decode than H.264, which could cause a performance problem if your system is just on the edge of being fast enough for H.264. I haven't done any scientific measurements with Blue Iris for H.264 vs H.265 efficiency. I found this page with some graphs comparing decoder efficiency for different codecs, and it showed H.265 decoding at about 80% of the speed of H.264 decoding. Keeping in mind Blue Iris almost certainly uses different decoder software that could have different performance characteristics, it is probably pretty similar.

Your choice of codec in the camera's web interface has almost no impact on UI3. Blue Iris re-encodes the video to send to UI3 (and to mobile apps or other web services) and therefore the format does not depend on what the camera originally sent.

 

[XrayDoc88]

What CPU is in your Blue Iris server, and what kind of hardware accelerated decoding did you have configured in Blue Iris for that camera? What resolution and frame rate is the camera?

Intel Core i7-8700K. Camera is a 4MP Dahua set to maximum resolution (2688x1520) at 20 fps. I have "Intel" selected for hardware acceleration, although I don't know what "Intel +VPP" means.

Your choice of codec in the camera's web interface has almost no impact on UI3. Blue Iris re-encodes the video to send to UI3 (and to mobile apps or other web services) and therefore the format does not depend on what the camera originally sent.

Weird, because the performance issues (orange clock) in UI3 seem to have gone away when H.264 is chosen for the camera. Are sub streams necessary for UI3 to work properly? I have both sub streams disabled because I don't really understand what they're used for and I thought it would decrease bandwidth usage on my network.