Head scratcher

[awsum140]

I have a no-name, POS, 4mp camera I bought about four years ago, long before I found this forum and became, shall we say, better informed. It has worked fairly well and I reduced the resolution to 2mp, frame rate to 10fp and the bit rate limited to 4096. Unfortunately it defaults to an iframe rate of .5 with no way to control that. Everything was working fine. All of a sudden things aren't so fine and I'm wondering if an update to BI might be related.

The camera watches the front of the house and is soffit mounted with PoE. The video was fine and I do have some extra IR lighting there that helps it out at night since it's not a StarVis. About a week and a half ago I noticed that while the live feed is fine all of the clips and alerts are not. The top 3/4 of the frame flashes from grey to green at about four or five hertz rate. Another thing I have noticed is that motion detected is now a blue, fully shaded, box rather than the normal red or green outline.

I've tried deleting and adding the camera, changing resolution, frame rate and bit rate. It does record in bvr and direct to disk like all my other cameras. I do plan on replacing it, eventually, but being cheap I would like to be able to use it until it finally dies. In it's current condition, it really isn't good for anything other than live stream.

Any ideas from the gurus here before I pester Ken?

 

[looney2ns]

Have you reset cam to factory defaults?

 

[awsum140]

Ya know, I haven't done that. I'll give it a try later this morning, do a hard reset, and see what happens. It allegedly has a "hard" reset option in the software. I checked in Tiny Cam and it has "tearing" in the video it didn't have before so I am suspecting the camera is giving up the ghost. Maybe a hard reset will do the trick, we'll see.

Incidentally, Looney, I have one too...Dad model. Gotta protect the solar panel.

 

[fenderman]

try disabling hardware acceleration

 

[awsum140]

I'm not using hardware acceleration. Running Win7/64/Pro. I will be migrating, painfully and reluctantly, to Windoze10 in the near future on this machine against my better judgment. It frosts the hell out of me that Microsoft is now supplying a "serice" and not selling a "product". I hate getting "serviced" by someone I don't trust further than I can throw a bulldozer. On the other hand, being able to use HA and run as a service, easily, will be a big plus.

 

[awsum140]

Life is good, I managed to find a "workaround". I spent some time, this morning, playing with camera types but given the humongous list of cameras in BI that got boring, really fast. I took a look using Tiny Cam on a tablet and that was showing the camera at the 15fps rate that I had reset it to which in turn, pointed to BI as the culprit and not the camera. Then I remembered I had exported the settings for each camera back in June. Imported the old file, reset the detection zones and everything is fine, once again. I will email support with exports of the working and non-working camera configs hoping it might be of use to Ken.

 

[awsum140]

So an update to this "saga". The first fix didn't actually fix anything, the green returned to recorded video. So I contacted support and Ken was nice enough to ask for access to the camera. I set that up and he got back to me with a real diagnosis. The camera is a (cough, cough, mumbling quickly) Reolink under the hood. I switched to the older Reolink RTSP configuration and everything is fine...but there is another monkey wrench in this saga.

I had enabled hardware acceleration for CUDA a few days ago when the update came out. This morning my system crashed, monitor was a black screen and BI had shut down, could tell by no activity on the camera ports on the switch. After the reboot, I shut off hardware acceleration. During my email conversation with Ken I went back and looked at the clips from this camera from this morning. The green had disappeared right after I shut off the hardware acceleration. I let Ken know the sequence of events from today and will probably test again, tomorrow, to see if the green shaded recorded video comes back when I turn hardware acceleration on again.

Kind of still scratching my head.

 

[awsum140]

A final update.

This POS camera apparently is some kind of clone/rebrand of a (cough, cough, quick mumble) Reolink. It works fine with a Reolink RTSP profile. It won't work with the RTMP profile which probably means it's a very early 4MP, just a guess. It does not work well with hardware acceleration enabled on it. So, it is running without hardware acceleration and the CPU is still running around 10% with hardware acceleration running on the rest, eight, cameras. I will be adding another camera next week, Dahua 2231, and don't expect any problems at all.

 

[TonyR]

I have a renewed respect for a man that will openly admit that he owns a "... (cough, cough, quick mumble) Reolink."