One camera blurry on BI 5.1 (server), but clear as a bell on remote apps - how does this happen?

syzygy

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So, I have 3 cameras:
Two (2) Dahua 5231 using POE switch on it's own VLAN,
and One (1) old 640x480 Foscam, over WiFi (also on VLAN)

All three working clearly from our iPhones (BI Security app), but I can launch the BI software from the HP (where these cameras are recording 24/7) one of the 5231 is just 'live static' - large gray pixels actively dithering - no discernable image.

I'm guessing the 'backend' is working fine, and the viewer I'm launching as part of BI is a sort of 'front end' that's not configured right?
(and the mobile app is a 'front end' is configured fine?)

I have tried restarting the camera, and also I updated Win10 (well, Win10 prompted that - I rarely run the BI viewer on the server)

I'm running BI (5.1 something - no more updates) on my Win10PC (HP i5 ProDesk)
I know I have alot to learn - I don't know 15% of what BI can do yet (don't know how to quickly get a lay of the land, so to speak), but it's been working great for a couple years now, aside from pre-trigger & trigger in general not behaving well...

- any chance this is a known screw-up in my setup, or will I need to pay to update first, then post screenshots to try to get it diagnosed?

Thanks in advance
 

syzygy

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Possible substream setting somewhere.
Wow - thanks for the fast reply!

So, I quickly went to look that up, to see what that means, and it seems like you're probably right (and i can't check it now, since the wife is watching TV - I've got the HP direct to the AVR receiver), but I still got the pixel/static when I set the camera to 'solo' - doesn't solo use the main stream?

Thanks for your help!
 

wittaj

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Try turning off Hardware Acceleration.

Is the camera viewing fine in the Camera GUI (logging directly in to the camera)?
 

Flintstone61

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@wittaj, Buy a Tier one POE switch. ( LOL) and a core i-7 10700 with 6000Gigs of Ram. LOL
Ok seriously though, have you compared all the settings of the working 5231 with the goofy one?
Or how about deleting the camera and then readding it using defaults.
 

Flintstone61

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Good Morning, (yawn)
If I remember correctly, ( which I often don't)
Blue iris 5.1 might be be "pre-substream"?
So I'd lean with Wittaj's answer
 

syzygy

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Hello again - I've got the camera feed working again in the BI UI (console?), and I know what did it, but not why.

The problem I was having (until 10 minutes ago) was one of the 5231 cameras was appearing as large pixelated gray 'noise'. No discernable image. That was how i would have described it last night.
Today, the image did look - a little bit - like it could have been a moving shadow on a section of concrete zoomed in to about 20 pixels by 20 pixels. But I think that's mostly my imagination.
The camera's image was 100% perfect when viewed live from the remote app on any iphone in the family. So, it was not the camera.
And I'm using Release 5.3.2.11 x64 (9/2/2020)

So, on your advice, I checked the camera settings - every single setting was identical to the other 5231.
Main stream: 2.1MP, 30.04/0.50fps, 512kB/s
Substream; --
Hardware accelerated decode: Default

I'd checked/unchecked a number of things that seemed plausibly related - for example, for Hardware accelerated decode, i tried "No", "Intel", nothing changed.
I tried re-starting the camera, but of course, everything I tried changing would re-start the camera as well.

I checked every camera setting comparing both 5231 - everything was the same.

Finally, I deleted the camera, added a new camera (clicked 'copy another camera', then changed the IP address on it to the one I wanted) - BOOM!
-It works now!

(but it was working when viewed remotely, just not locally on the BI server machine)

So, that's it - anyone have any idea what might have gone wrong? Simply Windows being non-deterministic? Bit rot?

-SYZYGY
 

TVille

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If you select a camera and then spin the mouse wheel, it will zoom in to the camera, and stay there. Double click on the camera to make it large, and it stays zoomed in. Sounds like that is what you had done. Deleting and recreating the camera would have fixed it, as would have spinning the mouse wheel the other way.
 

syzygy

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Flintstone & wittaj - thanks for your quick help - I appreciate that!

Fenderman & TVile - that sounds very likely - and despite having no idea how to zoom in in the first place, the possibility had occurred to me, so I tried selecting the camera and scrolling the mouse - but no zoom in/out seemed to happen (with any camera) - which doesn't mean you're not correct, just that I'm evidently not aware of how to do it correctly (might still have managed to zoom once without knowing how?). Is there another way to zoom?
-also, I first noticed the problem last night - it was already pretty dark out, but the 'static' looked light gray. (also not conclusive)

Thanks everyone!
 

Flintstone61

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Fenderman is one of the most experienced BI people in here.
He is probably right on this one.
When I was brand ass new with BI, I'd screw up a camera daily.
I've accidentally mouse wheeled on the screen and zoomed up a camera or 2 as well.
Takes awhile to get fluent with this software.
mistakes are part of the process.
 
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