4K camera video and audio lags exessively and becomes several minutes out of sync

[kiyolaka]

I've been having issues with my new Amcrest 4K 8MP camera in Blue Iris.
It seems that no matter how I configure the encoding options Camera side or settings BI side that the video will start out about 2 seconds out of sync, gradually becoming further out of sync as time goes on.
The video will also sporadically skip frames, have ghosting/artifacts, cut out and other oddities. Audio sounds excessively distorted. I'm using Direct to Disk recording with Blue iris Video Format.
I'm temporarily working around the issue by running the camera with 1080p resolution.
There are no issues viewing the camera stream via browser, the amcrest PC app, VLC or my phones.

Blue Iris is running within an ESXI VM on a PowerEdge R53
E5-2650L 12c/24t (VM has 6 cores) and averages about 28% CPU load. None of the cores seem to be taking upon a disproportionate amount of load.
48GB ram (VM is provisioned 8GB) Load sits around 20% memory util.
OS: Windows 10 Pro, 2004
Boot: OS drive is stored on a NVME
Storage Drive is a 2TB WD purple.

I've tried about everything I could think of except purchasing a Single slot height Quadro and passing it directly through to BlueIris.

[atreyu]

Are the recordings ok?

I had a similar problem, but it was more of a slow updates of live feed and poor motion detection. But the recordings looked fine. My fix was to uncheck “limit decoding unless required.” In checked mode, BI only displays and analyzes for motion key frames.

[kiyolaka]

Thanks, I had already given that a try since I saw it mentioned in some of my google searches as having worked for some. Unfortunately the watermark on the camera itself (I enabled for troubleshooting) in the recorded video is also out of whack as well as the audio/video sync.

I'm wondering if this has to primarily do with the xeon and it's lack of Intel QuickSync.

[mikelkal]

Disabling Windows page file worked for some...

[kiyolaka]

Disabling Windows page file worked for some...

Thank you for the suggestion, unfortunately doing that in conjunction with increasing the RAM in the system had not resolved the issue.


here's the list of things I've done so far.
- Tried increasing CPU core allocation
- Tried Increasing memory allocation
- Updated Blue Iris to latest stable build.
- Tweaking FPS, Encoding format, max stream rate, resolution and several other camera side settings.
- Disabling Windows Page File.
- Verifying that Direct to disk recording is being used.
- Turning off recording and having it for live view only (incase it was some weird issue with HDD performance)
- Adjusting various decoding options within BI, ultimately disabling them altogether.

Again the strangest thing is that there is NO issue whatsoever with VLC, SightHound (when using H.264), Amcrest Surveillance Pro or the camera's web browser interface which makes me think it's some weird problem with BlueIris itself trying to use a feature not available on the Socket 2011V3 Xeon CPU (specially QuickSync via an intel iGPU)

I'm currently working on trying to get a reasonable deal on a Quadro M2000 via ebay which I can then offload decoding onto for my 2 camera streams. I figure I can just allocate the GPU to Plex if it doesn't do the trick for BI

[kiyolaka]

Purchased the m2000 and a dummy plug... Will update once It arrives and I've tested using nvidia decoder

Would have gone for a p2000 but they're a bit expensive and I really only have two streams... Shame the poweredge r530 can only accommodate a single slot GPU... Maybe if I get ambitious I'll look at ordering a second gpu riser and seeing if I can modify the PCB to swap the x16 slot position...

[rml52]

Let me know if anything helps. I have a r510 and have the same issue and done the same steps.

[rml52]

I heard back from BI support and they said adding a sub stream might help with some of my issues and once I added a sub stream my time started to look better.
Have you tried adding a lower quality sub stream

[kiyolaka]

Let me know if anything helps. I have a r510 and have the same issue and done the same steps.

Made some changes and so far it's been stable for the past 15 minutes.. Going to keep an eye on it the next few days to make sure it stays within sync.

- Install Quadro M2000, along with a dummy plug connected to Port one on it.
- Enabled PCIe Passthrough for the Quadro in Vsphere (VGA and Sound controller)
- Assigned the Quadro's PCIe interfaces to the BlueIris VM
- Installed the Nvidia Drivers
- Disabled the VmWare VGA Adapter (otherwise BI won't properly try to use it for decoding (even when selecting the card # in properties).
This does however have the unfortunate side effect that I can no longer use the VmWare console to view the VM and have to use a different remote desktop utility (currently using splashtop) MS RDP, Teamviewer, logmein and the like would all work though, just not anything VmWare native.
- Configured BI to use NVDENC decoder for the video stream(s).

So far the camera has been completely stable for the past 15 minutes and not becoming slowly out of sync... No blurring, stuttering or frame skips either.
Will update after it's been going for a while.

One odd observation is that switching to NVDENC to decode the streams didn't really make a noticeable difference on the CPU utilization which does anecdotally support my theory that there is some sort of encoding related defect when Intel QuickSync isn't available for a 4K stream. The Quadro GPU has been pretty much sitting at a stable 20% Decoding load.

:EDIT:
3 hours so far issue free, I'm feeling good about this.

[kiyolaka]

So far things are running fairly well, there's some frame skipping on the recorded stream but nothing as horrendous as what I was previously encountering.

Update: I resolved this by selecting "ALSO BVR" in the hardware assisted decoder settings.