I am building an automated workflow to produce time-lapse videos daily out of Blue Iris and the core function is working well. In another thread I explained how I have things set up to record video from one camera, then move that vide to a second storage location and export a time-lapse at that stage.

My issue now is that export performance is pretty poor compared to the resources available. I upgraded my camera server to a brand new i7-12650H CPU with 32G of RAM and an M.2 main system drive along with upgrades storage of 4 4TB SSD drives connected via a USB-C 10G dock. I found the sub-stream technique and enabled that while I was at it (although I'm not 100% sold on that just yet because of some sloppy switching back and forth there, but that's for another discussion).

All of that has left me with a camera server that is basically purring along at less than 10% CPU load under normal conditions and with a very responsive UI and much faster web interface as well. I don't yet know how much historical video I'll be able to have now, but I'm sure it's far more than I need so I am very pleased with all of that. What I'm not pleased with though, is the performance of exporting video.

Whether it's by way of the storage moving technique, or manually exporting, it takes far longer to finish one export of 1 hour of video than I would have thought given the new hardware available to the software. With a 10% CPU load "resting rate", I would have expected an export to be able to use the other 90% (or most of that). What I actually see though is the CPU only rise to about 15-18% so it barely moves.

I've changed the Preset between all three options without any noticeable difference in speed. I've increased the Threads up to 8 at this point with no noticeable difference in speed. Is there anything that can be done to crank the export performance up to 11?

Is there a separate external application that would be able to convert the bvr files to mp4 maybe? Maybe Blue Iris itself just isn't the "right" tool for bulk exports?

Found some references to using FFMPEG to do this conversion from years past, but that is not working for me currently. Either the BVR format has changed or FFMPEG has changed, either way or for some other reason, FFMPEG doesn't seem to be a viable solution anymore unless anyone knows of a new trick that will get it to work.