Newbie with problems

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Getting the hang of it
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Hey all,

Brand new here so don't be too hard on me!

Having some serious lag/pausing issues in Blue Iris [Release 5.3.0.1 x64] when it comes to using specifically 4K (3840x2160) resolution with my Annke C800 bullet cam. I can switch the resolution to 3072x1728 and I have absolutely no problems.

The issue appears to be strictly with the way Blue Iris is handling the high-res stream. I am having no problems for instance when I access the high-res streaming on the BlueIris server using VLC.

To test, I created two camera objects in BI -- one SD object @ 640x480 [using the camera's RTSP substream], and one HD object @ 3840x2160 [using the camera's RTSP main stream]. Both streams are set to H.264, both are capped at 15 FPS, I have a timestamp overlay on the feeds, provided by the camera itself (not BI). When I first start Blue Iris, the two objects time will be in sync for a second or two. Then, the HD object will slowly but surely start to fall behind the SD object; 20 seconds behind, 40 seconds behind, eventually multiple minutes behind, to the point where the timestamps on the HD object are way off. This happens not only in the live view, but also in the exported footage. In an exported footage example, if I pulled into the driveway, got out of the car, and walked up to the house, all the motion is very choppy and has pauses in it. If the event actually took approx 20 seconds in reality, the video clip is approx 30 seconds (for example)

As I mentioned before, I change the resolution (in the camera's Video settings) to 3072x1728 and the problems go away completely.

My Blue Iris / hardware setup is as follows:
Dell PowerEdge T630
Xeon E5-2609 v3 (6 core, 6 thread, no hyperthreading) @ 1.9GHz
Win 10 Pro running as a VM on FreeNAS [bhyve hypervisor]
Tried multiple different combinations, but VM currently has 6GB RAM, and 6 vCPUs.
The VM has a 40GB C: drive, used for the OS and BI Software, and a 1TB E: drive, used for the Recordings -- the drives are two separate zvols which come from a dataset comprised of 4x 1TB 7200RPM disks. Compression is lz4.
Virtual NIC is using VIRTIO [tried E1000 as well, makes no difference]

The ONLY camera currently joined to this instance of Blue Iris is this one single Annke C800. When @ 4K, the CPU/Memory are even not being hit hard -- still tons of breathing room. I have also gone through and taken care of all the optimizations listed here: Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage but still no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
 

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FYI for anyone else who might be having this problem, I may have some sort of solution. I lowered the "Max. Bitrate" setting on the camera down to 5120 and the issue has gone away [for now].
 

SouthernYankee

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You are you are using a 6 year old room heater processor in a VM. It more than likely does not support video ghardware acceleration . You also are not using substreams for motion detection. That is your problem.

Correctly configure your system.
 

tumtumsback

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SouthernYankee, thanks for being blunt. And yes, you are correct -- I am not using substreams for motion detection. I have my substream set up for 24/7 continuous recording, and I have the main stream set up for recording on trigger, and I am using BI motion detection within the main stream as the trigger.

Are you suggesting I'd get better performance if I use the motion detection from the 480 substream as the trigger for recording on the 2160 main stream? I will most likely be moving towards AI Computer Vision + MQTT for triggering shortly down the road, but, just messing around using BI native motion detection as a trigger for the meantime.
 

SouthernYankee

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I do not run the latest version of BI. A relatively new feature of BI is to use the substream for motion detection when it is associated to the primary higher resolution stream. I would recommend recording the the primary stream at the high resolution continuously at 15 FPS with an iframe of 15. Then use the associated substream for motion detection.
 

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@looney2ns That's a shame to hear... I got the Annke 4K because of this video: / Also on that YouTube video, in the comments, I see he recommends the Reolink RLC-410-5MP as a good 5MP camera. Do you suggest this model? If so, I'd be happy to return all my Annke cameras in lieu of the Reolink cameras.

@SouthernYankee I have taken your suggestion and I am now trying to use the substream to trigger the recording on the main stream:

-on the substream trigger tab, I have the motion sensor enabled and configured, and I don't have the "Sync with camera annkeHD" checked
-on the main stream trigger tab, I have the "Sync with camera annkeSD" checked and so everything below it is grayed out.

I'm having issues with this though. On the substream, I have configured zones/areas to ignore the cars driving by the house [holding CTRL and drawing]. I verified the zones are correct by checking with the blackout/obscure option, and the zones are properly drawn to blackout the cars driving by. For troubleshooting, I temporarily enabled the highlight/rectangles feature, and enabled the "only highlight when triggered" option, and it's usually when either a large/long car, or two cars in a row drive by, that the HD stream starts to have the highlights and boxes around the car as it's driving by. Also, strangely enough, the SD stream never presents these highlights and boxes when they occur; they only show on the HD stream. Any suggestions here as to why the zone defined in the SD stream might not be being respected on the HD stream? Sounds like I really need to start setting up AI/Deepstack.

Also, guys, for the record, I have been using this PowerEdge T630 as my FreeNAS box for a while -- I didn't purchase this box for the purpose of Blue Iris -- I figured I would try to use my FreeNAS box as a repository for footage, and why not try to run the Blue Iris VM natively on it. I am totally cool with setting up a separate bare metal box for this NVR initiative, but just giving this setup a go first/for now.

Thanks for all the help!
 

CaseyJones

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I have removed that scammers video

I couldn't find anything using the search. I'm pretty sure I know what video tumtum is referring to. Why are you calling it a scammer? Curious because I couldn't find anything and I don't wanna follow the Youtube creator down a rabbit hole if his advice is BS.

Edit/update: I did find a thread referring to one of his other YouTube videos
 
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