Headless PC: orange clock icon when displaying 4k live feed.

[SebaVT]

Can I have some advice on what can be causing my BI setup to play 4k recorded clips fine, but when displaying 4k live feed from a camera I get the orange clock icon and the video freezes?

It displays the feed just fine the first 5 seconds then freezes and I get the orange clock icon. Then play another couple of seconds and freeze again, making the live video unwatchable.
The CPU never goes over

I'm running BI as a service on a Dell Optiplex 7040 with:
RAM Size: 16 GB
CPU: i7-6700 3.40GHz
SSD Capacity: 250 GB
HD Capacity: 4TB 3.5" HDD

recording four 4k cameras at 15FPS and one 1080P at 15FPS.

Using BI web UI.

Funny discovery:
I was redacting this post and opened the remote desktop of the NVR to screenshot the CPU usage graph and noticed that the problem is gone while I'm with the remote desktop open, not even with the application running on the machine just the bare desktop. And the problem is back when I close the remote desktop. Any clue on what can be causing this behavior?.

 

[bp2008]

I'm not 100% sure. There's a strong chance though that something about your graphics hardware is going into low power mode when it thinks (incorrectly) that it isn't needed because there is no active display.

So, is this a headless Blue Iris server (no monitor connected)? Could you plug in a monitor and see if that makes it perform properly? If so, you can buy a cheap display emulator which is just a small HDMI or Displayport dongle that makes the computer believe there is a monitor connected. Amazon.com : display emulator

Alternatively you may be able to get a software-based solution working. I haven't tried this but it looks promising: Activating a Secondary Display on Windows 10 when no Monitor is Connected - Amyuni Technologies

 

[SebaVT]

I'm not 100% sure. There's a strong chance though that something about your graphics hardware is going into low power mode when it thinks (incorrectly) that it isn't needed because there is no active display.

So, is this a headless Blue Iris server (no monitor connected)? Could you plug in a monitor and see if that makes it perform properly? If so, you can buy a cheap display emulator which is just a small HDMI or Displayport dongle that makes the computer believe there is a monitor connected. Amazon.com : display emulator

Alternatively you may be able to get a software-based solution working. I haven't tried this but it looks promising: Activating a Secondary Display on Windows 10 when no Monitor is Connected - Amyuni Technologies

You nailed it, I connected a monitor to the server and the video feed is fluent while the screen is on. I'll try the HDMI Dummy Plug and report back.

 

[SebaVT]

I've been testing the HDMI Dummy Plug a few and I can confirm that this solved my issue 100%. I just had to set the display to never go to sleep.