Video stuttering, hardware probably underpowered but want to confirm configuration is fine

S

seth-feinberg

Young grasshopper
Aug 28, 2020
87
15
I am experiencing bad stuttering when trying to view the stream on any one of my cameras (about a 4 second delay in movement and then just a single frame at a time).

This is the machine running blue iris:

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I have 16 Amcrest IP8M-T2499EW () loaded in it with substreams (I think). Here are the video settings for one individual camera:
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and here are various settings from an individual camera in Blue Iris (Clone Master is also selected):
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I set this all up about 3 years ago right before I had a child and have been getting nagged enough by my wife to get it up and running that I'm just starting from scratch. I'm following this guide, but obviously followed the earlier version 3 years ago. I haven't gotten to the Alerts/Triggers recording section yet, cause i haven't been able to simply VIEW the video streams of my cameras. Also I can't remember what the clone protocol is. I seem to have "2" cameras for each camera (for example Cam2FloorHD an Cam2Floorai, with the HD version marked Clone Master)
One thing I did change in the ensuing years was segmenting my network and moving the cameras to their own VLAN (with rules only allowing them to talk to themselves and the Blue Iris PC, no internet). Initially I had the Blue Iris PC still residing on my LAN and a rule that gave all the cameras access and I thought that might have been the issue, but I've since moved the PC to the Cam VLAN and the problem persists. I'm prepared to upgrade my hardware, especially if that's what turns out to be the issue, but I swear it worked with the same number of cams and same pc 3 years ago so I'm just making sure I haven't made some obvious error in my set up. I also am curious if there are steps I could take to really hone in on the issue/bottleneck. Task Manager shows that maybe Ethernet is high but CPU or Memory never spikes:
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All cameras are plugged into the same Unifi POE Switch that the Blue Iris PC is also plugged into with gigabit connections.

If I forgot a crucial piece of information (maybe a log?) please just point me in the direction of how to find it and I'd be more than willing to post. Thanks so much in advance for any help y'all can offer.
 
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Switch to H264 and CBR and turn hardware acceleration off if it is on and up the receive buffer to 40MB.

Clones could be used for anything, so you would have e to disable and see if you lose something you have.
 
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lol i write PC never spikes while posting a Task Manager screenshot where it spiked. I dunno what did that. All I did was open blue iris and enlarge one of the cameras from thumbnail to full screen then close it and screenshot Task Manager. I just tried reproducing that and there was no spike
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Opening a camera to full screen switches it to mainstream and thus the spike
 
wittaj said:
Switch to H264 and CBR and turn hardware acceleration off if it is on and up the receive buffer to 40MB.

Clones could be used for anything, so you would have e to disable and see if you lose something you have.
Click to expand...

I've done the first 2 suggestions on 2 cameras (though one only had a H.264H option none w/o a suffix. I then went to turn off hardware acceleration but it was already off. So I toggled it to Intel, restarted the cameras (should this be done in the Unifi Switch UI or by right clicking the feed in blue iris?) but it didn't make a difference. I then turned off the Hardware acceleration and restart the cameras again (still no change in stutter). I didn't find the receive buffer but I am currently googling...

Should I make the H264 and CBR changes to ALL cameras? or is it sufficient to just change a couple and check that a difference was made?
 
seth-feinberg said:
was just coming back to say I'd found it (duh, sorry). I changed it to 40, the camera seems to have restarted but the skipping persists. I'll try to toggle hardware acceleration again
Click to expand...

toggling Hardware acceleration and restarting a single camera I've made the cbr changes to, doesn't seem to have changed the issue
 
Did you change H264 for both main and sub stream?

There is something else going on. Do you have BI excluded from anti-virus?

While an older machine, it is capable if the CPU isn't maxing. I have a 4th generation as well with way cams going just fine.

My humble i5-4590 still humming along with 30+ cams:

I see people posting about their i7-xxxx system bogging down with less than 10 cameras so I wanted to update my setup. I have ~33 cams running on my BI system: HP Elitedesk 800 G1 tower i5-4590 @ 3.3GHz 16GB ram 12TB total purple drives for storage 30+ total cams currently - 22 cams visible in...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
wittaj said:
Did you change H264 for both main and sub stream?
Click to expand...

Yes. though H.264H for the one where H.264 weren't available
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wittaj said:
There is something else going on. Do you have BI excluded from anti-virus?
Click to expand...

I don't think so. though, that was still the case 3 years ago when i'm near certain it worked. Currently no threats detected and no allowed threats added.
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wittaj said:
While an older machine, it is capable if the CPU isn't maxing. I have a 4th generation as well with way cams going just fine.
Click to expand...

Yes, like i said, i feel like this exact setup WAS more-or-less working as expected when first set up. One OTHER thing i changed since (very little) was I upgraded BI. I can't remember exactly but I think i went from 5.4 ish to 5.7.8.3. Just want to finish with thanking you for taking the time.
 
Confirm that BI is in the excluded folder list and that defrag is turned off.

What are your drives - makes and capacity?
 
OK next step is to disable every camera and CPU% should be 0. If it isn't then something else is running and causing the issue.

If it is 0 then enable one camera at a time and see if the issue persists. It might be a problematic camera and deleting and re adding fixes it.
 
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Fake News said:
I wouldn't revert back to h.264 if it was me. Turn on h.265 and + if your cams have it. Uses way less disk space. Less writing to the drives as well. Yes you might drop a touch in cpu usage but not huge if anything. It's not night and day going back to h.264 if anything.
=
Click to expand...
Blue iris does not support h265+ which generates dynamic iframe intervals..This will cause lots of motion detections and/or playback issues.
 
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wittaj said:
OK next step is to disable every camera and CPU% should be 0. If it isn't then something else is running and causing the issue.

If it is 0 then enable one camera at a time and see if the issue persists. It might be a problematic camera and deleting and re adding fixes it.
Click to expand...

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VorlonFrog said:
Did I see the cameras were set to record 30 FPS? If so, drop them all to 16 FPS and it will probably help. It's an i7, but 4th gen, and 30FPS on all cameras would probably be pushing it.
Click to expand...
I think they're actually set at 15FPS according to the actual Camera settings:
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But i read in the amazon description that it was 30fps so I simply set the max image size here at 30:

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I feel like that shouldn't have an actual impact but please correct me if i'm wrong
 
seth-feinberg said:
I've done the first 2 suggestions on 2 cameras (though one only had a H.264H option none w/o a suffix. I then went to turn off hardware acceleration but it was already off. So I toggled it to Intel, restarted the cameras (should this be done in the Unifi Switch UI or by right clicking the feed in blue iris?) but it didn't make a difference. I then turned off the Hardware acceleration and restart the cameras again (still no change in stutter). I didn't find the receive buffer but I am currently googling...

Should I make the H264 and CBR changes to ALL cameras? or is it sufficient to just change a couple and check that a difference was made?
Click to expand...
The hardware acceleration was off, because your cpu does not support 265 hardware acceleration..only 264...if turned on when the cam is set to 265 it will not work and may crash BI.

Delays like this are often network or network card related....I would try another switch and an updated driver on your network card.
You also have not confirmed that BI executable and storage folders are excluded from antivirus...
 
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