SOLVED: EmpireTech IPC-T5442T-ZE Recorded Video Mostly Unviewable

[Cor K Dikland]

Solved by @wittaj , see post 3

I installed the above camera about a week ago for most part all is good. One major exception is trying to view recorded video. The playback often stalls for as long as 10 seconds, plays 2-3 seconds, stalls again. This appears to be worst during night time recording although other times recording will stutter but no where near as bad.

I have another nearby camera (Reolink RLC-810) recording at the same time and its video is 99% without stalls.
Switching the video storage between these two cameras made no difference in either two.
I tried multiple Video Recording options (i.e. Triggered, Continuous, etc) with the same dismal results for each.

I need to stress this problem is only with recorded video. Life feed is without issue.

Below are screenshots of both BI and EmpireTech settings. Does anyone see anything obvious I need to change?

 

[EMPIRETECANDY]

@wittaj BI expert, please help give some instructions

 

[wittaj]

Switch to H264 for both main and substream.

Bump the Receive Buffer to 40MB.

What computer are you using (i number and gen number)?

Make hardware decode NO

Are the cameras isolated from your LAN via VLAN or dual NIC or are they passing thru the router?

 

[Cor K Dikland]

Switch to H264 for both main and substream.

Bump the Receive Buffer to 40MB.

What computer are you using (i number and gen number)?

Make hardware decode NO

Are the cameras isolated from your LAN via VLAN or dual NIC or are they passing thru the router?

Made the changes you recommended above. Now we'll just have to wait and see.

PC Specs below. I have 13 cameras running (mostly Reolink). My CPU % is very low 9%-18% most of the time.

 

[Cor K Dikland]

Are the cameras isolated from your LAN via VLAN or dual NIC or are they passing thru the router?

Passing thru the router

 

[wittaj]

CPU seems a tad high for a 7th gen.

What kind of drives are you saving to (WD purple, etc.)?

Post a screenshot of your BI clips and archiving page showing how your storage is set up.

Ok going thru the router can be causing the issues.

Unlike the reolinks that will play with bitrate, FPS, and other things to favor a bright image at the expense of everything else (thus lower demands watching and playing back), the 5442 will pump out a constant bitrate and your router probably cannot keep up.

Now that doesn't explain why it is fine for live view and not playback, thus the questions about storage.

Unlike Netflix and other streaming services that buffer a movie, these cameras do not buffer up part of the video, so drop outs can be frequent going thru a consumer router. 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 goes 45 seconds. Now do the same with a camera connected to a router and it is fairly instantaneous (within the latency of the stream itself)...

Most consumer grade wifi routers are not designed to pass the constant video stream data of cameras, and since they do not buffer, you get these issues. The consumer routers are just not designed for this kind of traffic, even a GB speed router.

That is why most of us run the dual NIC system.

The dual NIC is cheaper and faster, and depending on the number of cameras, better than VLANs (although true VLAN users will refute it).

For example, the EdgeRouter X is claimed to be somewhere between 800Mbps to 1Gbps, but you see tests all over where people are only getting in the 700Mbps range.

On my isolated NIC, my cameras are streaming non-stop between 350Mbps. This is full-on, never stopping to take a breath. Even if someone has a gigabit router, a 3rd of non-buffering 24/7 data will impact its speed.

I would just as soon not have that much video data going thru a device if it doesn't need to. Has to slow the system down.

 

[Cor K Dikland]

CPU seems a tad high for a 7th gen.

What kind of drives are you saving to (WD purple, etc.)?

Post a screenshot of your BI clips and archiving page showing how your storage is set up.

I am cautiously optimistic that the new settings you provided above fixed my issue. I have never seen recordings from this camera this smooth during playback. I will reserve my final opinion until tomorrow and see how well the night time alerts/recordings play back. As far as storage, below is a BI storage screenshot. Personally, I would not read too much into it. This was the first place I looked last week and when recordings on the NAS (WD Red - 4Tb) were super jerky, I moved storage for this camera to either of my two Samsung 2tb SSD connected directly to this PC. Surprisingly, it made no difference.

 

[Cor K Dikland]

I am cautiously optimistic that the new settings you provided above fixed my issue. I have never seen recordings from this camera this smooth during playback. I

Confirmed. The above setting changes posted by @wittaj (once again) fixed my problem. Recorded video plays back smooth like butter

 

[wittaj]

Awesome! Glad it worked!

 

[Cor K Dikland]

I installed another T5442T-ZE S3 and set the Encode parameters identical to the first camera as recommended by @wittaj above. For the BI setting I simply imported the BI settings of the first camera and adjusted the IP to match the new camera. As I am not using ONVIF (yet) I disabled this option and am using BI motion detection. My problem with this camera is identically opposite of my first. The live stream is jumpy as hell (1 second interval) but the recorded video seems fine. This makes no sense to me. Hoping someone can help me out or explain this to me.

Additionally, as I mentioned above, I am using BI motion settings and the only way I can get any triggers is by setting to maximum sensitivity

 

[Cor K Dikland]

My problem with this camera is identically opposite of my first. The live stream is jumpy as hell (1 second interval) but the recorded video seems fine. This makes no sense to me.

I "solved" this problem by disabling the substream which appears to have solved not just the jumpy live stream but the BI motion detection as well.