Blue Iris

The continuing inability of Blue Iris to adequately handle 4K activity is an increasing source of dissatisfaction with its development for me.

I could care less if CPAI can tell the difference between a goat and a bicycle, but do care about horrendously poor rendering of even an h264 4K live stream at 15fps on a 4th Gen i7, a 6th Gen i5, and lastly, a 9th Gen i5 server. 4K stutters, hops, stops on I-frames, tears with h265, and generally sucks on every server I've built.

I've jumped through all the hoops..., going on three years now. Wasted countless hours trying all the bad advice some believe to be gospel on 'optimizing' Blue Iris -- as if there's only their way of using the platform. First bit of BS advice was a Skylake processor was required due to the h265 support and additional h264 GPU processing. Then it became an 8th Gen as the magic bullet so I built a 9th Gen server. Still no joy. I've tried it all multiple times. I've also run the same cameras on the same servers through VLC viewer with flawless results. Gee, what does that indicate?

I personally don't stare at license plates in a parking lot all day at 1fps. My system is primarily for live surveillance in real time. Blue Iris performs the task wonderfully and has for 3 plus years -- until it was tasked with doing so using 4K sources. Seems to me that development focus should be paying at least some attention to this particular issue..., unless of course it's been quietly fixed in a release that broke something else since my last upgrade.

The BI apologists always claim "we're not making movies here" or "there's really no difference between 30fps and 15fps"..., among other shallow lines of bullshit to simply avoid the elephant in the room, which is Blue Iris sucks at rendering 4K streams at anywhere near the capabilities of the cameras people spend hundreds of dollars for. Instead, they're advised to reduce the capabilities of their expensive new schmega-pixel cameras by cutting its balls off to satisfy the shortcomings of Blue Iris for pure crap 4K decoding anyway. I personally find that absurd.

Then again, maybe it's just me. Regardless, I'm very frustrated by my personal experiences with this issue and am interested in how others perceive their BI system performance with 4K sources.

If you're frustrated too, at least I'm not alone. If on the other hand you're pulling 4K 30fps streams like running water, what am I missing and how are you doing it?

TIA for any and all relevant input and/or enlightenment.

I mainly have 2MP Dahua cameras and they are fine, but I did add the Reolink 5MP POE doorbell camera. That is working fine here at full resolution and no complaints other than the audio being much worse than the Dahua. Since it was designed for two way talk it probably means I have a setting wrong, but I can't find it.
I do read of people here with 40+ cameras of 4MP and higher, so it can be done.
I won't pretend to be able to answer your query, but have you chatted with Support to try and resolve these issues ?
As a matter of interest, when I ask somebody to try reducing resolution etc, it is as a test. I am an old electrical/electronics Engineer with decades of knowledge of fixing things and a mental tool bag of next things to try. Everything is set to 11 here

I had a lot of trouble with Empire Tech and BI at h.265, but changing to H.264 solved it. I ran 7 4k cameras at my last house on a pretty old I7-6700k without issue, am now putting up new ones a mix of 8mp and 4mp, no issues with performance, CPU loafs.

Thanks for the report. Sounds promising.

Care to share specific server and camera configuration details?

And yes, the BI h.265 implementation is a disaster any way you cut it, though I have made it work to a limited extent..., with Reolink cameras no less. Still not ready for prime time by any means.

It occurred to me I probably should not have posted what I did, because I only run 4fps so I can have a reasonable file size and keep 30 days or so of full time recording. So there's a lot less horsepower required. Though I have run 24 (+/-) fps to test briefly.

I'm using Empire Tech IPC-T58IR-ZE-S3 and IPC-T54IR-ZE-S3, the server is a home built based on Z-170WS MB, with 64gb memory and spinning raid set of purple WD drives for video, with a GTX 970 (though I had nothing in it for a long time and have not really noticed a difference).

But in my case it's the frame rate.

My posting though was mostly because H.265 was mentioned. I had all sorts of issues when I used H.265. If you haven't, I'd try H.264.

Ferguson wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2024 5:05 pm It occurred to me I probably should not have posted what I did, because I only run 4fps...

Thanks for the clarification and context, though I pretty much indicated my BI application use case is designed around a real-time live streaming surveillance setup in hopes of generating responses from folks with similar intentions and expectations for high level results. Real time to me is when running water looks like running water..., typically at 20fps+.

tinyCam Pro on a GoogleTV 4K streamer works perfectly for me at 4fps for $3.99. I currently run 22 cameras (several 4K) on such a setup "with no issues at all" at 4fps, too.

Not what I'm shooting for here as sources of realistic comparisons. But again, thanks for your response. If your gear and setup works for you, that's what matters.

I run 11 cameras, but only two 4k. rest are 4mb (mostly 5442's). 15 fps, and all run very smooth in BI (current version). H264+ (yes, H265 gave me problems in BI). I used to run motion and CPAI, but updated firmware on the 5442's that alert on animals let me now use IVS only for alerts, eliminating CPAI, and it works great. But all live video, including the 4k, is smooth and without issue (or 15 fps smooth, enough for my needs). I'm pretty sure I could up it to 20fps, but no need. Server is an old Dell i7-6700 running windows 10, hard drive is a 4TB WD Purple. So not exactly a powerhouse system.