Starting with the Decode node because easy to test. HA is frequently the biggest difference between live view and playback. If live view works, turn HA on/off during playback (select/unselect Also BVR). Also BVR is unselected by default. HA works well with steady streams (live view) because the GPU buffer can fill up and the hardware can process frames at a steady rate. With playback, users can go back and forth in the video using the playback controls. This use case is not conducive in general for HA so HA is frequently off during playback.

D2D
If your record settings are set to D2D (very popular due to CPU savings), the camera feed is saved directly to disk. D2D should work with playback if live view works. Changing the encoding settings on the camera affects the contents being saved to the file. This is how you indirectly fix playback by altering the content being recorded. See camera setup article for ideal encoding settings.

Re-encode
If you cannot get playback working with D2D, then switch to Re-encode. If playback works, you may take a CPU hit, but at least the recording can be played back on the media player on your server.

The quick fix is to switch from D2D to Re-encode. This tells BI to save the camera video stream using BI's decoding/encoding. This almost always works, but you will get the CPU bump.
If you want to troubleshoot D2D, the levers to pull are as follow

Effects of turning Also BVR on/off.
Screenshot of camera stats. Camera settings -> General tab.
Server health

Reported Issues. Many, many artifacts/permutations of the same issue.

• Green bars as seen below.
  

  

• Washed out image
  

  

The fix: Camera feed node
Simplify encoding. In this case, we changed the camera's encoding from H.264 High to H.264 Baseline. Alter Camera encoding settings until streams work.

Reported Issue:
Ghost images. See below.

Very common problem.

Ghost images occur when BI cannot decode the intermediate frames (p-frames / b-frames) coming from the camera. The image on the left, i.e. the actual scene was in the same mp4 video (video created on phone recording the console, not an mp4 export. to be discussed below) and would flash every 1s which was the key frame. In the ghost image (intermediate frame) you can kind of make out the mailbox behind the man walking. FYI, I enlarged the ghost image portion in the second image so you could see the correlation to the original scene. The image is not to scale.

The fix: Decode node
Turned off hwva.
In this case, the encoding/decoding incompatibility was between the camera and Intel QuickSync. For some reason, the camera stats were saying the key frame ratio was 30 (mjpeg stream). It was almost as if the H.265 encoding from the camera was interpreted by the hwva as an mjpeg stream and thus rendering each intermediate frame as if it were a key frame. When hwva was turned off, the key frame ratio was 1 just as the camera settings show (GOP 1 I-frame / 1s).

As mentioned earlier, the user used his mobile device to create the video, not exporting to a file in BI. The user stated when exporting to a file (MP4), the video was fine. Big clue.I also know the default export setting is to re-encode using BI software. Thus the decode node for live view was through hwva, but decode during export is through BI software. A big difference between the two video paths is how decoding is done, so I suspected hwva must be the culprit. An example of using BI functionality to Isolate the issue.

The video pipeline for live view is very basic: Camera feed -> Decode -> Live view. If your live view quality is poor you only have 3 options.

• Revisit the camera feed settings: Camera setup article has best practices. (Fix for Gotcha 1)
• Toggle hwva on/off and see if video improves. Video tab article discusses hwva and the many other BI server settings affecting streams. (Fix for Gotcha 2)
• If you turned off hwva (above) and the issue was resolved, maybe upgrade drivers or upgrade the graphics card.
• Maybe revisit your connector settings. Switch from Generic/RTSP driver (Step 2) to a vendor driver (Step 3) and see if it makes a difference.

If still an issue, support may need to get involved and remote test.

Choppy streams, i.e. the live view or the playback is not smooth or the seconds on the time overlay are not sequential. These issues are almost entirely due to camera encoding settings. If the cameras are speaking Spanish and BI is speaking English, neither party can understand each other resulting in a poor experience.

Video path: Camera video -> Decode -> Console view

• Camera video: Check out the camera stats, Status -> Cameras tab. The FPS should be at least 15 fps.
• Camera video: Look at the key frame ratio in Camera -> Stats. Anything less than 0.5 may provide a bad experience. Set Key frame interval = fps, e.g. 15.
• Revisit Camera setup article.

Video path: Camera video -> Decode -> Console view

Almost always, camera streams are sluggish because BI is not receiving enough key frames (i-frames). Need to alter encoding settings on the camera.
As stated above, key frame ratios less than 0.5 lead to sluggish cameras.
Revisit Camera setup article.


CPU maxed out

The other reason for lagging camera feeds in live view is the cameras are high resolution and the BI server cannot keep up. If your CPU is running above 80%, it is working too hard. In my opinion, above 50% is concerning. My CPU with (4) 2 MP cameras (I know, not much) hovers around 8%.

See CPU Utilization Gotcha for possible fixes.

Video path: Camera video/feed -> Decode -> Console view

Camera feed: Change stream setting from Constant Bit Rate (CBR) to Variable Bit Rate (VBR)
Suppose a key frame is sent from the camera every 1s. If the CBR setting is too low, then the camera needs to perform image optimizations to get the frame across the network. Those optimizations lead to the glitches. So simply changing the camera setting to VBR instead of CBR should resolve the issue. In general, setting your cameras with VBR is a better user experience. CBR should only be considered if you have network bandwidth issues.

Streaming artifacts are often due to camera encoding settings or HA as seen above. Occasionally, Video tab settings can affect streams. If the above suggestions do not resolve the issue, revisit the Video tab article. Below are settings that generally work. The highlighted settings are the ones that usually get people in trouble when set or unset to non-default values.