Troubleshooting poor video recording quality and software issues

[Gilera 0]

Hi.

This is my first post - nice to meet you all.

I have been setting up a residential CCTV camera system at my house over the last few months. I need this due to the need to record threatening behaviour/verbal abuse from a neighbour and tampering with my property.

I am very new to all of this but trying hard to learn by myself and have put a lot of effort into trying to get a usable and reliable set and forget system. Due to a lack of experience, I am unsure whether my expectations are too high as far as quality of footage and reliability of software. I am starting to get a little frustrated.

I would have thought that the hardware I have would be more than adequate for what I am trying to acheive.

 

My setup is as follows:

Hardware:

Illustra 2MP (1080p) Mini-Dome cameras (three of these that were brand new)

i7-3770k processor HD4000 GPU, 3tb hard drive, Win 10

TP-link gigabit network switch TL-SG1005P - connected to 3 cameras POE, computer, modem/router

Cat 5e cable.

ASUS dsl-ac68u modem/router

I am viewing the feed and changing settings through the Xprotect Smart Client and Management Client via remote desktop on laptop connected to network via Cat 5e to modem/router.

Very good ping times (<1ms) when pinging camera IP directly from laptop. No lost packets.

Software:

Xprotect Essential+ using hardware acceleration. I was using iSpy prior to this but was having a lot of problems which I couldn't troubleshoot. Mainly the cameras falling into a calibration cycle when changing certain settings and then the software crashing frequently.

 

I have been having 2 issues.

1. Despite changing various settings, I am having trouble getting good quality video footage.

I am using 1080 resolution 25fps. Have tried both VBR and CBR (6500kbps).

The video is jerky (motion) despite the max FPS. Sometimes it seems the system is not able to cope with a high level of motion - e.g. a person walking will get blocks of pixels that drag with the motion.

I would have thought the hardware combination would give better results and am unsure if I have a bottleneck or if it relates to the settings. CPU only sitting at about 4-5% using hardware acceleration. The HD4000 GPU in the i7 is a bit older now but would have though was up to the task.  I cannot view the GPU usage through Windows 10 as the HD4000 does not support this.

Xprotect seems to have quite a few settings that are set low by default and I have been trying different things one by one but nothing seems to have helped. It is not just viewing the footage via my laptop either, the issue remains when the video is exported to AVI and played back.

One thing I am trying to better understand is which settings relate only to quality of live feed and don't affect recording quality - both in camera settings and software settings - in an attempt to reduce unecessary use of bandwidth. This is not very clear in the Xprotect support materials. There are a couple of places to adjust quality and it is not clear whether they relate to live feed only or live + recorded video. In one place the support materials state that if a camera delivers live video in a very high quality, de-coding of images may increase the load on the Recording Server service, which may in turn affect ongoing recordings negatively. In another place it states that changing image quality will affect both live feed and recorded video. I am wondering if my problem lies somewhere here. 

 

2. The second issue I have been having is a couple of occasions where Xprotect has lost connection to the cameras and the recording server has stopped working for no apparent reason. On one occasion this coincided with a persistent issue after restarting the system and restarting the cameras where the connection to one of the microphones was broken. The only way I managed to fix the connection to the microphone was to change the audio bitrate setting back to 64kbps in Xprotect (I had changed to 128kbps two days earlier to attempt to obtain better audio quality). I can't imagine why that would affect anything. There is mention in Xprotect support materials to indicate that changing certain settings

 

Can anyone provide any general advice?

Thanks