Blue Iris Video Recording freezes (VIDEO)

[EOppie 0]

I posted this over at cam-it.org and didn't really get any ideas:

http://www.cam-it.org/index.php?topic=3682.0

 

I have been having an ongoing problem with BI with video recordings freezing.

 

Example 1

 

Example 2

 

(FYI I tried to embed these, but kept getting an error from Vimeo even though I had embedding enabled.)

 

You can see that the video freezes on both cameras when triggered. I originally thought it was just a playback error in BI, but when I exported the video it was the same. I also have a hard time reproducing the error, it seems to just happen randomly, but more-so overnight and in the morning. I checked to make sure that there were no system processes scheduled during that time such as the antivirus scan or a defrag check.

 

Here is the dedicated system I am using:

Dell Optiplex 990

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad Core

Operating System: Genuine Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit

Total Memory:16GB PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz Memory

Hard Drive: Patriot Pyro SE 120GB SATA III SSD

External Drive (Archive): 2TB WD MyBook

Graphics: Intel® HD 2000

 

The freeze is normally around 5-10 seconds. It will play for a bit, and then freezes.

 

1 Camera is a Dahua IPC-HDB3200C (Ceiling Porch)

 

The second is an Axis M1114 (tighter)

 

However this has happened at least once on all of my cameras. Which are different models and brands (Sony, Panasonic, Axis, Dahua) This is what leads me to believe it is an issue in BI rather than a specific camera issue, or integration with specific camera.

 

Any ideas?

[hotwire 0]

Are you recording to the SSD or the WD external?

[EOppie 0]

Are you recording to the SSD or the WD external?

 

New clips are recorded to the SSD. Once the folder hits 20GB they are moved to Archive, located on the external drive.

[buellwinkle 0]

What's the CPU % during recordings?

[EOppie 0]

What's the CPU % during recordings?

 

The highest I see it go is when it triggers a group with 3 cameras at once, and it goes to 60% but that is pretty rare.

[hotwire 0]

Any chance the external is a WD green drive? I had problems with the video freezing on my system with the green drives, moved to WD reds and the problem went away.

[EOppie 0]

Any chance the external is a WD green drive? I had problems with the video freezing on my system with the green drives, moved to WD reds and the problem went away.

 

I don't believe it is. Did this effect things when it was being used for archival purposes as well?

[dexterash 0]

Does the whole computer freeze or just the recording?

 

If only the recording, maybe it's a switch that makes the problem or the NIC (packet loss, buffer full etc).

 

It does the same with only one cam? What if you direcly connect the camera to the PC?

[StanLee2066 0]

I use to get this all the time when recording to my NAS. Recording first ~3-4 seconds after motion detect fine, then freezing for ~8-10 seconds, then fine after that. The freeze time was caused by the spin-up time of the hardrives. They were set to sleep after 10 minutes so this happened quit often, and was a big problem since the first few seconds are critical when someone is approaching the camera.

 

I'm currently making changes to my setup to avoid this, however with an SSD drive on a PC that is always on I imagine this would not be cause of your problem.

[MaxIcon 0]

Agreed, the SSD shouldn't contribute to the issue, but if the PC's giving the external drive a command and waiting for it to spin up, it may be what's holding up the system. If this were the case, though, saving another video right after the one with freezing would be successful.

 

I see this sometimes when I do random stuff that doesn't affect my external HD, but the system decided to check in with it and everything hangs for a few seconds while I hear it spin up.

 

You could check a couple of ways - set the external HD to not sleep, or hang a spare internal HD on one of the ports, set it to be always on, and archiving to that to see if it makes any difference.

[EOppie 0]

Does the whole computer freeze or just the recording?

 

If only the recording, maybe it's a switch that makes the problem or the NIC (packet loss, buffer full etc).

 

It does the same with only one cam? What if you direcly connect the camera to the PC?

 

It does it randomly on all cameras attached to the system. Everything is connected via a Catalyst Express 500 Series POE switch, and I do not see any errors in the syslog.

 

I thought I had set the external drive not to sleep, however I think I may just get another drive and put it inside the machine and set to archive. To see if that eliminates the problem.

[buellwinkle 0]

Have you tried looking at STATS on BI. If the frame rate it gets from the camera does not jive with what you specified, feces can happen. I find it's best to set the camera to VBR and the default is CBR with Dahua.

[EOppie 0]

An Update.

 

I checked, the drives are not sleeping. I placed an internal drive inside the machine, and it still has the problems discussed before.

 

However I did make an interesting observation. When motion recording starts on a group of cameras, the frame rate drops to almost 0 in the "stats" windows for all of those cameras.

 

I checked, and the switch is not reporting any errors, and shows it is only peaking at 40% port utilization at max. It is a Cisco Catalyst 48 port POE switch, 10/100 and I am using the gigabit uplink port to connect to our router/switch (Cisco RV180-K9-NA) which the BI machine is directly connected to via a gigabit connection.

 

Now I am just scratching my head.

[buellwinkle 0]

If you have time, try another NVR solution, for example NVR+. I found it did better with Dahua cameras and used less CPU resources than BI. I can't use it because it won't support my ACTi cameras, but when I tested it with Dahua it worked well. It's sold by Linovision.com. Honestly, if I had all Dahua, I would go this route as I've yet to find something better for Dahua, not to say there isn't better out there.

 

http://download.cnet.com/NVR/3000-2348_4-75578497.html?tag=mncol;1

 

I did have BlueIris and the Dahua HFW3200C both crash at the same time. I had to restart the BlueIris, the camera worked but it was sooo painfully slow and gave out of resources errors so I rebooted it and all went back to normal. Don't know what triggered this.

[EOppie 0]

Thanks for the tip. I still have a mixture of brands, and this problem was happening even before I threw a Dahua camera into the mix.

 

I am almost ready to simply try constant recording. Yeah, it will be a storage nightmare, but it may be a better route.

[MaxIcon 0]

You might want to try an older version of BI. It's updated quite frequently, and sometimes bugs slip in when other bugs are fixed.

 

When I find a stable version, I keep that on my primary system and avoid upgrades until I've had a chance to test them on another box (or check the cam-it posts for issues).

[buellwinkle 0]

MaxIcon, I know you use BI on the same equipment I do, an i3-540 and frankly, if I put 6 cameras on there (3 ACTi 1.3mp at 8 FPS) and 3 Dahua (1.3MP at 30fps, 2MP at 30fps, 3MP at 15fps) that sucker runs 100%. I ended up taking the 3 ACTi off and running them on the same PC with ACTi NVR software. With the 3 Dahua it's running about 50% with BI minimized. Should I pickup an old used i5 CPU chip and swap that out. The only problem is the i3 has video built in, so that may mess up the HDMI outputs I have now and I'll have to get an external video card.

 

At this point I'm thinking that when ACTi gets their new cameras out, I'll switch back to all ACTi because their NVR software ran about 1% busy on the same PC and was miles ahead of BI. I liked NVR+ for Dahua, but they don't support ACTi cameras.

[MaxIcon 0]

Yeah, those 2-3MP cams, and the ones at 30 fps, will definitely bog down that box.

 

I looked into the CPU upgrade a lot, and my MB (Intel DH57JG, in an old GVI AutoNVR box) will accept an i5-660 or 661, both of which have on-chip video. According to the benchmarks, the 661 will give a roughly 20% improvement in performance, and tends to run $150 or more.

 

Based on this, I upgraded my MB and CPU both, and reused the RAM from the old box. It cost a bit over 2x the chip cost, but gives me a whole lot more upgrade room for the cameras, and definitely seemed like the mid-term value path. The new box has much better on-chip video, faster I/O, better HD subsystem, etc.

 

I'm running both in parallel for now, but will probably switch off the old box this weekend.

[buellwinkle 0]

I'm using the same thing, AutoNVR. So you kept the same box and power supply but changed the MB and CPU. I thought about that but everytime I try that it always costs me more as there's incompatible stuff. I didn't know they had an i5 that had integrated video, I'll take a look at that.

[ak357 0]

Stop playing with toys

have a look

26 All 2 MP cameras using 47% full res and frame rate

(Server has old name as 24 cam )

[buellwinkle 0]

That's high, I only use 1% with ACTI NVR 3.0, but neither it or Avigilon works completely with Dahua. Then you are comparing a quad core, probably newer i7 to my i3. If I had a modern day i7, I can probably get 6 cameras with BlueIris

[ak357 0]

That's high, I only use 1% with ACTI NVR 3.0, but neither it or Avigilon works completely with Dahua. Then you are comparing a quad core, probably newer i7 to my i3. If I had a modern day i7, I can probably get 6 cameras with BlueIris

I forgot to mention

47 % was with 2 client connected to server

No client connection and no local client (just win service)

look below

[MaxIcon 0]

I'm using the same thing, AutoNVR. So you kept the same box and power supply but changed the MB and CPU. I thought about that but everytime I try that it always costs me more as there's incompatible stuff. I didn't know they had an i5 that had integrated video, I'll take a look at that.

 

No, I had a spare micro-ATX box with a nice PS, and wanted room for expansion cards and possible RAID, so I basically built a new system after throwing out the antique MB from the micro ATX. The AutoNVR will go back to the utility pool. I bought several of them, and have one running as a WHS2011 server, one as the garage PC, and one in a bigger case running my NV6240 system.

 

You can put a new mini-ITX MB and CPU in there if you don't mind the space limitations. I really like the small size of these boxes.

[MaxIcon 0]

Stop playing with toys

have a look

26 All 2 MP cameras using 47% full res and frame rate

(Server has old name as 24 cam )

 

I'd ask about the cost, but the Avigilon Cone of Silence is hovering over my head...

[ak357 0]

 

I'd ask about the cost, but the Avigilon Cone of Silence is hovering over my head...

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