UI3 audio issues

[chemistocrat]

Hello,

So I recently bought a new computer (Dell PowerEdge T610) to offload Blue Iris to from my other machine, a PowerEdge R710, where it was running in a Windows 10 VM with 8 vCPUs.

The new system has 2x Xeon X5675 CPUs, which are 6 cores each with hyperthreading for a total or 24 logical cores. No VM, the system runs Windows 10 bare metal and absolutely nothing else is runing on the system so all the CPU power is thrown directly at Blue Iris.

I exported my settings from my install on the previous system and imported them to the new one. The problem I'm having is that now the audio cuts in and out when accessing the cameras' live feeds OR any stored clips when using UI3 from a browser (Chrome). The little speaker icon at the bottom of the video turns from green to yellow and when it's yellow, the audio will not play. The previous machine did not seem to have this problem, and I actually switched back to it to confirm it wasn't just me going crazy. Even with the old system at >70% CPU usage, the streams seemed smoother and the audio from each of my two cameras played smoothly even at the 4MP stream quality.

Now, the audio cuts in and out or just doesn't play altogether when streaming or watching clips at >720p. I have fiddled with every possible setting imaginable, and I'm now at a loss. Bit rate is limited in UI3 settings under all streaming profiles, and in Blue Iris, it says it's limited to 512 kbps. Surely, with a system with far more available resources, this shouldn't be happening.

FWIW, here are some technicals:

2x 4MP cameras, each @ 15 fps, 8xxx kbps, H.264 codec
Old machine wrote to a NAS datastore (FreeNAS VM), constant record + alerts using Blue Iris codec direct to disc
New Machine writes to local RAID 0 array, 6x 2TB disks
32 GB RAM on each machine
Old machine had 2x L5640 Xeon CPUs with 8 vCPUs for the Windows 10 VM

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[looney2ns]

Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk
Raid isn't good for video.

$150 i5-6500 would do better and not be a room heater.

 

[chemistocrat]

Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk
Raid isn't good for video.

$150 i5-6500 would do better and not be a room heater.

That guide suggests that RAID is "not usually recommended," as in "isn't really necessary," not that it "isn't good." There is nothing inherent about a RAID 0 array that would negatively affect performance, rather, the opposite. As a matter of fact, my previous setup using FreeNAS stored video on a RAIDZ2 array, which offered about 1/7th the performance of my current arrangement, and it worked better (suggesting that performance is probably unrelated to the storage setup). My disk usage in task manager is never greater than 15% on the video storage array, and it is a separate array of disks from where Windows is installed so nothing but BI is accessing those disks.

I'd really like to look at exhausting all options with my current hardware before throwing more money at a problem that in theory should not exist, seeing as how it worked on lesser hardware. If anything, I'd like to figure it out to satisfy my curiosity and learn better how to troubleshoot BI than the actual necessity of needing it to work on this piece of hardware.

 

[samplenhold]

I know nothing about VMs and less about using Xeon chips for BI. But one thing I do know is that there have been others having issues with audio depending on the cams and the audio format chosen.

What cams do you have? What audio format have you chosen?

Does your new machine have a sound card or is it onboard sound?

Do you have the same issue if you are not using UI3, like if directly using BI on the native machine?

If you export a short video from one of your cams, does the audio work OK?

Maybe @bp2008 can wade in here.

 

[fenderman]

Step 1, throw the new system in the garbage. Its a space heater that will cost you more to run than buying 100-150 dollar efficient system.

 

[chemistocrat]

I know nothing about VMs and less about using Xeon chips for BI. But one thing I do know is that there have been others having issues with audio depending on the cams and the audio format chosen.

What cams do you have? What audio format have you chosen?

Does your new machine have a sound card or is it onboard sound?

Do you have the same issue if you are not using UI3, like if directly using BI on the native machine?

If you export a short video from one of your cams, does the audio work OK?

Maybe @bp2008 can wade in here.

Cams are 2x Dahua IPC-T5422TM-AS

Audio format is AAC, 16000 hz as the other options I find to be totally unusable as they are lower sampling rates.

I have tried using both AAC and MP3 options in the encoder configuration under web server options.

The machine has no sound card. I access it directly using Remote Desktop Connection on an iMac. Quite ironically, when accessing it this way, live video and stored clips run perfectly smoothly, audio does not cut out, and audio works fine on exported clips as well. The only time I have audio issues is when accessing anything through UI3 at a resolution higher than 720p. I usually can get away with 1080p without issue but 1440p will not stream audio. The speaker icon in the bottom left hand corner turns yellow and no audio is output.

Attached is a screenshot of the audio cutting out when looking at "Stats for Nerds" while viewing an alert clip on one of my cameras. I was viewing at 1080p when I captured this. Rate limiting is set at 2048 kbps for this streaming profile as I believe is the default.

Also attached is a screenshot of the same clip playing on the old machine at 1440p, also with the default rate limiting of 4096 kbps enabled. No audio clipping.

The only difference I have been able to elucidate from these two installations is that the newer machine has a newer (presumably the latest) version of BI4 installed, whereas the old machine has an older version (4.7.6.6). Not sure if something possibly UI3-related changed that is causing my issues between those versions.

 

[samplenhold]

Why are you on BI4?

So you are running 2X Xeon w/o soundcard for the BI server, doing UI3 from an iMac and are on BI4. Basically way beyond a typical BI setup. I have no experience with any of that.

My only recommendation is to upgrade to BI5 and if you still have the issue, email BI support.

 

[chemistocrat]

Why are you on BI4?

So you are running 2X Xeon w/o soundcard for the BI server, doing UI3 from an iMac and are on BI4. Basically way beyond a typical BI setup. I have no experience with any of that.

My only recommendation is to upgrade to BI5 and if you still have the issue, email BI support.

I saw no immediate need to upgrade to BI5 when it debuted, and still really don't, since my setup was working fine as was, BI5 didn't introduce any must-have features for me, and I didn't feel like shelling out another $60 if I didn't have to.

The way I see it, it should be no different than most any headless setup. Sound card should be irrelevant since I don't need sound at the system doing the recording, since it has no monitor and I don't access it locally. Sound encoding is done CPU-side anyways. iMac should be irrelevant also, it's plenty powerful and since UI3 is browser-based, it's OS-agnostic. The Xeons are way more horsepower than should be necessary for a two-cam setup. I have absolutely no doubt they are not the bottleneck here. It seems like it's something BI4 is doing to try and mitigate what it misinterprets as going over some arbitrary bandwidth limit.

I was actually one step ahead of you and tried a demo of BI5 on the new system and got similar results - maybe ever so slightly better, but audio is still cutting out about 1080p. I can't even get the audio to cut out on the old system when I stream or view clips at the 4K setting.

Basically, ignoring the systems, I'm wondering if anyone here knows about why or how Blue Iris determines when to stop streaming audio (and turn the little speaker icon from green to yellow) in UI3. If I can figure that out, maybe I can adjust whatever is limiting it.

 

[fenderman]

I saw no immediate need to upgrade to BI5 when it debuted, and still really don't, since my setup was working fine as was, BI5 didn't introduce any must-have features for me, and I didn't feel like shelling out another $60 if I didn't have to.

The way I see it, it should be no different than most any headless setup. Sound card should be irrelevant since I don't need sound at the system doing the recording, since it has no monitor and I don't access it locally. Sound encoding is done CPU-side anyways. iMac should be irrelevant also, it's plenty powerful and since UI3 is browser-based, it's OS-agnostic. The Xeons are way more horsepower than should be necessary for a two-cam setup. I have absolutely no doubt they are not the bottleneck here. It seems like it's something BI4 is doing to try and mitigate what it misinterprets as going over some arbitrary bandwidth limit.

I was actually one step ahead of you and tried a demo of BI5 on the new system and got similar results - maybe ever so slightly better, but audio is still cutting out about 1080p. I can't even get the audio to cut out on the old system when I stream or view clips at the 4K setting.

Basically, ignoring the systems, I'm wondering if anyone here knows about why or how Blue Iris determines when to stop streaming audio (and turn the little speaker icon from green to yellow) in UI3. If I can figure that out, maybe I can adjust whatever is limiting it.

The upgrade is 30 or 35 dollars depending on what option you choose.