Blue Iris

Hi all. I'm using 8 Reolink RLC-822A cameras, and after a ton of fiddling and reading other forum member's experiences, BI seems to be accepting the camera streams with no issues.

However, I'm still having one issue which may or may not be related to the idiosyncrasies of the Reolink cameras... Live view only updates if the camera is either triggered, or I have selected that camera in the live view. My expectation is that the live view / video wall gives me a continuously updating view of the outside of my house, from the substreams, and that I can expand those views and see the main stream with a double-click, all regardless of if the camera is triggered at that moment. Going full-screen on any single camera also results in a smooth live-view, and it very obviously switches from the 640x360 substream to the full 4K main stream.

This doesn't seem to be a resource issue... The CPU is only running at 2-5% utilization, 20% RAM utilization, and incoming network bandwidth is 75Mbit on a 1Gbit link (7.5% utilization). Is there some setting I'm missing here? My most common use of my existing (analog) cameras is to view the current situation outside my home, frankly recording and replay is less of a consideration.

Thanks,
Brendan

If your talking about live view in the Main BI window on your server make sure the pause button directly under the x to close the app didn't get hit at some point, that pauses the video Windows on that screen.

Thanks for that suggestion, but no, the pause button is not activated.

My expectation is that the live view / video wall gives me a continuously updating view of the outside of my house, from the substreams, and that I can expand those views and see the main stream with a double-click, all regardless of if the camera is triggered at that moment.

Yes, that is how it works here. It sounds like a sub-stream issue, but they are clearly working in the background if your triggers are working.

So what can stop you viewing the sub-stream if you are looking at the matrix. Hmm, well we have to start somewhere, so - what happens if you disable the sub-stream on one camera ? You can do this by copying the camera and removing the sub-stream on the copy. Does that work in matrix mode ?

Hmm, analog cameras ? I have two D1 resolution cameras connected to BI5 via a Picolo Pro 2 card, and they don't have sub-streams, but they do work in matrix and full screen modes in BI5.

Please clarify, is this an issue with your IP cameras or the existing analog cameras ?

TimG wrote: ↑Mon Apr 26, 2021 4:10 pm

My expectation is that the live view / video wall gives me a continuously updating view of the outside of my house, from the substreams, and that I can expand those views and see the main stream with a double-click, all regardless of if the camera is triggered at that moment.

Yes, that is how it works here. It sounds like a sub-stream issue, but they are clearly working in the background if your triggers are working.

So what can stop you viewing the sub-stream if you are looking at the matrix. Hmm, well we have to start somewhere, so - what happens if you disable the sub-stream on one camera ? You can do this by copying the camera and removing the sub-stream on the copy. Does that work in matrix mode ?

Hmm, analog cameras ? I have two D1 resolution cameras connected to BI5 via a Picolo Pro 2 card, and they don't have sub-streams, but they do work in matrix and full screen modes in BI5.

Please clarify, is this an issue with your IP cameras or the existing analog cameras ?

Thanks for these suggestions. I disabled the substreams on all my Reolink cameras, and indeed the matrix now updates live. Of course, the CPU load on the PC has increased significantly. It's also not entirely smooth, but I suspect that's due to the CPU load.

Regarding my comments about analog cameras... Sorry for the confusion, this was just an example of how I use my existing system, which the new cameras and BI implementation are to replace. So, to be clear, the issues I'm having only pertain to the new IP cameras.

My next thought is that you didn't have the correct sub-stream. What you originally described is what I think would happen if your sub-stream was jpg rather than video.

Can you let us know the stream profiles for the main and sub-streams ?

For example my Dahua has:
Main: /cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0&unicast=true&proto=Onvif
Sub: /cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1&unicast=true&proto=Onvif

Can any other Reolink users let us know their sub-stream settings ?

So the main stream works with either simply / or: /h265Preview_01_main.
The substream uses: /h264Preview_01_sub.

Both of these strings match what's provided by the reolink documentation. It's also what BI automatically fills out for main and sub streams after inspecting the cameras.

It's still really odd that if I select the small window for a camera in the matrix view, it "wakes up" and has smooth video again. Feels like some kind of UI deprioritizaion.

BTW, I also set the computer's power saving profile to "high performance", so it doesn't step down the CPU speed... No effect.

You can try posting a picture of your settings page so we can take a look. My favorite thing to point out (because it frustrated me for a week wondering why display and triggering were so poor) is you probably want “limit decoding unless required” unchecked. It sounds good but it means BI only displays and uses key frames for grid view and trigger detection. My Reolink cameras have a 0.25 key FPS.

You can also try deleting your camera(s) and reconfiguring them now you know how they should be set up. BI’s blessing and curse are a bunch of knobs to play with. There are also some good basic guides out there for optimum camera setups.

atreyu wrote: ↑Thu Apr 29, 2021 10:08 am You can try posting a picture of your settings page so we can take a look. My favorite thing to point out (because it frustrated me for a week wondering why display and triggering were so poor) is you probably want “limit decoding unless required” unchecked. It sounds good but it means BI only displays and uses key frames for grid view and trigger detection. My Reolink cameras have a 0.25 key FPS.

You can also try deleting your camera(s) and reconfiguring them now you know how they should be set up. BI’s blessing and curse are a bunch of knobs to play with. There are also some good basic guides out there for optimum camera setups.

"Limit decoding unless required". That was the magic bullet! Thanks so much, all looks good now.

Yeah! I almost gave up mentioning it because no one else seemed to have that problem despite similar experiences.

I bet your cpu usage jumped quite a bit.