Missing about 62 seconds of recording (signal loss / no signal)

[alwaysoff]

Whilst reviewing my recording, it appears that blueiris didn't record / skipped about 62 seconds of footage. I've attached the video here, I am running it at 2x but it happens whether I'm playing it at 1x or higher. The missing footage starts 8 seconds into the attached movie, the BI overlay timestamp (the one on the bottom of the screen) shows 5:47:50 pm, and from then on, it would jump (after pausing for about the same amount of time that's missing) to 5:48:53 pm, on the video's timeline it's 39 seconds into the video, which is consistent with the 2x playback speed on blueiris.

Has anyone encountered this, and know why this happened?

View attachment Untitled.mp4

 

[The Automation Guy]

It could be a variety of things.....

Is the BI system overloaded? ie is it hitting 100% ram or CPU usage during these times of lost footage?
Have you checked the recording disk for bad sectors, etc?
Are you sure the network is stable?
Are the live camera streams stable? (via camera web portal or VLC or other other media player)

 

[looney2ns]

What time do you have the BI database routine set to run? No video is recorded during the time that it runs.
You can see how long it runs, and at what time in the BI log.

 

[SouthernYankee]

why are the two clock different ?
Are you using direct to disc ?
What make and model of camera ?
Are you recording to an internal disk drive ?
Is the BI machine dedicated to BI, no other uses ?

provide a screen shot of
1)windows task manager process tab sorted by memory (most at the top), Must contain, memory, disk, network, GPU, GPU engine columns
2) Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph,upper left corner) clip storage
3) blue Iris status cameras tab

 

[alwaysoff]

Thanks for all the pointers on what to check. Skip below to the big red text in the middle of the post.

• The difference between the two clocks - I will fix that once I am running the cameras in a separate subnet, and the cameras will use the NTP server on the BlueIris machine.
• Direct to disk recording is used
• The DB maintenance is at 2am (the default?), which is not when this skipping occurred
• AFAIK, the BI machine is not overloaded. I currently only have two cameras. BI is normally at 10-15% CPU. 16GB RAM, BI reports RAM usage of 350MB
• The disk is new, WD Purple 10TB. I started off slow-formatting it but then cancelled the slow format and just did a quick format. It was formatted with 1MB cluster/sector (IIRC)
• I haven't specifically done a sector by sector check for bad sectors, but I suspect it is highly unlikely to have a bad sector, but I know, it's not impossible that bad sectors exist on a new drive
• The network is stable, afaik. I haven't done a network stress test, but there isn't anything super busy on the network. The busiest ports are the camera ports, which is running on an 8-port Netgear PoE switch. Right now it's just plugged straight into my normal network switch (a 24-port gigabit Mikrotik switch), I haven't yet segregated the subnets - to be done later.
• My BlueIris machine connects to the network via a USB to ethernet dongle, which I am going to use later on for the "home subnet" and I'll use the onboard ethernet for the camera subnet. I doubt if this is the cause though, but I can't rule that out either.

Are the live camera streams stable? (via camera web portal or VLC or other other media player)

• It appears to be stable. I have used VLC to view it and haven't noticed any stuttering or bad streaming.
• The camera is IPC-T5442T-ZE - the 4MP Varifocal from empiretechandy
• The BI Machine is dedicated to BI, Dell Optiplex 7040 i7-6700 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD Boot + 10TB WD Purple. I ran the Dell hardware diagnostics several times to check the hardware health, including testing the RAM twice at least.

BINGO, this could be it, looking at BI logs- look at the highlighted item: The time matches when the end of the lost footage and when the video stream resumed (based on dahua's time overlay in the video).


Something seems to have happened to the network perhaps? Because both cameras driveway1 and frontporch had "signal: restored" at the same time!

I was away at the time, nobody was at home.




What would cause the NoSignal counter to go up? Is it when I changed the camera settings? I do that a lot to tweak / test settings, but we were away at the time this signal loss occurred, so it couldn't have been because I was tweaking camera settings.


Sorting by "Message" in the logs, I see other instances of "Signal: restored"




The only thing I could think of is the BlueIris automatic reconnection to the camera, but it was not enabled:

 

[wittaj]

I suspect the USB to ethernet dongle is the issue.

Unlike Netflix and other streaming services that buffer a movie, these cameras do not buffer up part of the video, so any hiccup on the USB and you lose signal. You would be amazed how much streaming services buffer - don't believe me, start watching something and unplug your router and watch how much longer you can watch NetFlix before it freezes (mine is 45 seconds). Now do the same with this USB and it is fairly instantaneous (within the latency of the camera stream itself)...

I tried once to see if I could use a USB 3.0 port for cameras, and the USB couldn't keep up even though the HDD was capable.

 

[alwaysoff]

I suspect the USB to ethernet dongle is the issue.

What is strange is that they seem to occur 12 hours / 24 hours apart, but yeah, I agree unless it's BlueIris, the USB Dongle could be the culprit. It does seem to be the weakest link here. I will switch to the onboard NIC and monitor this issue again in the next few days. I think/hope the USB dongle would be fine for the non-camera network for Blueiris.

 

[Old Timer]

Ia the camera set to reboot every 12 hours?

 

[alwaysoff]

Ia the camera set to reboot every 12 hours?

Good question. As far as I know, it isn't:

 

[wittaj]

Maybe the switch or some other component?

Could the USB be attempting to go to sleep or hibernate or low power based on some other computer parameter? Take a look at the device manager settings.

 

[alwaysoff]

This happened again even after I've moved my network connection to the onboard nic. It happened at around the same time, 5:36pm

I was in front of BlueIris when it happened, and this is what I saw:

About a minute later it recovered.

So I can rule out the USB ethernet dongle.

 

[alwaysoff]

Googling "blueiris no signal" I found quite a few hits from blueiris forums. No definite answer but I found one post by IAmATeaf "No signal" errors? - Blue Iris that might be the answer.

It's under Camera Config -> Watchdog -> Interpret Monochrome video as a loss of signal. Mine were on for both cameras. I'll turn it off and see.



I think this makes sense now. The times reported seem to be when the lighting changed from sunrise/set.

 

[looney2ns]

Have you performed every optimization here: Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Has the computer in question had a clean install of windows performed by using the MS Media Creation Tool. You mention Dells diagnostic, so I'm guess no on that question.

 

[alwaysoff]

Have you performed every optimization here: Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Has the computer in question had a clean install of windows performed by using the MS Media Creation Tool. You mention Dells diagnostic, so I'm guess no on that question.

I can't say I've performed every optimisation, but I've done probably most of it, like direct to disk, setting the frame/iframe to 15fps, setting the exposure to manual, etc. I will go through it again.

The computer was a refurbished one, it came already installed with windows, and I just used that. I'll look into MS Media creation tool thanks. The Dell diagnostics is part of the computer's BIOS.