Audio channel keeps disabling at random

[BBK]

Edit: I misunderstood something, that's on me. On clarification, it's the watchdog "Also detect loss of audio" feature that is responsible for disabling the audio channel. Turning this off should solve the problem and prevent the audio feed from being disabled. I still think this isn't expected behavior, and wanting to be alerted to something doesn't mean you want it turned off. Ken said he's still evaluating the disable overall if anyone else wants to provide feedback. Ignore the last line in my response.

I got a reply to my support ticket.

This happens if the camera is configured for audio yet is not sending audio.

You can always disable the audio watchdog on the watchdog tab in camera settings.

This... doesn't really make sense to me. Just because audio is interrupted, doesn't mean I want a setting to permanently change on it's own. I'm not sure if it's always been like this and I've never noticed, or if there was a change sometime recently.

I sent the following reply back.

Is this something that can be changed, either by the user (an option to never disable audio), or within BlueIris? This doesn’t seem like something that should happen. A camera might lose connection or audio for any number of reasons, as people on the forum are attesting to. That doesn’t mean that I want that setting to change or for audio to not be recorded when the camera resumes sending audio. In other words, it should behave like the video feed. If the feed is interrupted, BI will resume recording when the feed resumes. BI doesn’t turn off the video feed until the user manually re-enables it. For that matter, I wouldn’t expect BlueIris to make any changes to settings by itself.

[s]I’ll try turning on audio watchdog for now so I can at least monitor for this. I don’t feel like this is the expected functionality though.[/s]

[TimG]

The Help file states:

Improved watchdog effectiveness when a main stream or audio stream is lost. If the camera does not support audio, please disable it on the Audio tab to prevent watchdog resets.

That was because when they introduced the audio watchdog, we had multiple queries where forum members were asking why their cameras were going off, and the answer was generally that they had audio ON for a camera with no audio. The solution there was indeed to turn off the audio for that camera, and it prevented the audio watchdog from disabling the camera.

I think Support have got the wrong end of the stick

Edit: I see you edited and updated your post. Maybe it does make sense after all

[Pogo]

This 'Audio Watchdog' seems like a totally useless function whether the camera provides audio or doesn't provide audio..., or sometimes does and sometimes doesn't..., and we seem to have gotten along quite nicely without it until now.

Let me guess; it's yet another feature to somehow compliment AI while breaking something else -- again.

[TimG]

I don't think it has anything to do with AI, but I do wonder why it got "fixed" when we had no idea it was an issue