Lost connect pop up / drop outs in playback

[avatar42]

The issue is the lost connect pop up which sometimes does not go away when running as a service. Kind of surprised this has had little follow up since reports in Jan 2021. It is STILL going on and this has become frequent again with the 5.5.6.X versions. Crash time is sometimes in minutes with 5.5.6 as opposed to hours or even days with older versions.

What is actually happening here is two fold. There is an exception (in the current case an Integer divided by zero that appears to have started around version 5.5.5.0) that causes the service to restart. Sometimes the service does not fully restart and the lost connection pop stays on the screen. If you check your Event Viewer log for errors you will see this goes back a LONG time. In most cases though you will only notice it as a jump in played back video. Once the pop up stays on screen you might be able to restart the service to get things going again but I generally reboot to save time since the service is also not saving to disk while in this state either.

Attached is an example of the Error Event crashing the service. I should note this is only happening on 4 of my 5 servers and so far I'm at a lost to discover what is different about the one not seeing it. One of my servers was seeing it so often I completely replaced the server with all new hardware and software which seems to have made it more stable though as the 2nd image shows the divide by zero is still happening a lot. As footage is lost for all cameras while the service is restarting this is a MAJOR issue. The drop outs are bad enough but to lose all footage for hours is probably going to force me to changing all my servers to something else.

[YrbkMgr]

Just spitballin' a bit... thinking out loud. Happens on some servers but not others. Not likely a program bug or there would have been more chatter. I myself, use 5.5.6.4. My hunch is that most likely BI is simply an unwitting victim of something else and when it dies, event viewer says so. Are all servers running the same version of windows? 10 Pro? 11? Are you running BI service as Windows admin or Local System?

In your shoes, I would start with one machine, only work on that one, and use a tool to log all processes to catch the event when it happens. Sysinterals Process Monitor and Process Explorer are tools I use. Windows Performance Monitor too - schedule a trace. I would be looking into what happened just before and just after the event. Then, see if there's a pattern on a second server. It's old school grungy but that's how I think about it.

You didn't mention the Status Log or if you checked out the BI log file in C:\blueiris\log - that's enabled, right?

One more thing... search for Service in the help file (open it in a real pdf reader and search, not find), and also see the Troubleshooting Toolkit

[avatar42]

compare screen shot

2022-03-18_15-00-31_sm.jpg (166.04 KiB) Viewed 1363 times

The thing is unless you are looking at footage where a dropout happened you will probably not notice. Though there have been people reporting dropouts for some time but most replies suggested camera issues. The latest versions seem less likely to recover from the crashes though so people are starting to ask in the user groups. Personally I first noticed after applying updates so thought that might be related but the update histories do not match up with what works and what does not. Here is a screenshot of my spreadsheet if you think you can see something I'm not. Stuff that is the same as the one server not getting the error highlighted in green.

[YrbkMgr]

To be honest, I don't know what that image is. I had asked some questions and then wanted to see the Cameras tab of the status window. That's about as much as I can contribute...

[avatar42]

To be honest, I don't know what that image is. I had asked some questions and then wanted to see the Cameras tab of the status window. That's about as much as I can contribute...

Should be pretty clear. I shows details all the details (more than what is on the camera tab) about all the servers to compare the one that is working / not getting the error with all the ones that are not recovering. As I mentioned above the service restarts when it gets the exception. But it does not always come back fully so the console can not longer talk to the service and the service is not longer saving recordings.

[avatar42]

It is looking like downgrading to 5.4.9.18 might stop the divide by zero errors that crash BI and therefore work around the restart fail issue.

Note that is the old layout framework so downgrading will make disabled cams appear but you can turn them off again with the right click menu.

Note too new installs get 5.5.5.13 "latest stable update" which has the /0 error.