H.265 Native streams.

[kogashuko]

So I am slowly but surely replacing all of my older 720p escam cameras with Reolink cameras. I get they are not optimal with the keyframe settings but up until now I have been able to work around that easily. My resent problem has to do with the h.265 streams from a couple of the newer 4k cameras. This is not an issue in lower resolutions or with h.264 cameras. I also had this problem with another brand's 4k camera but it suddenly just went away one day and then randomly came back last week.

First on hardware. I have Blue Iris running on a dedicated Dell R410 server running a pair of six core processors. With 12 cameras is stays steady at about 11% CPU load while monitoring from the web server. This is with Direct to Disk and motion detection recording enabled. Substreams are enabled which has helped a ton with motion detection accuracy and CPU usage. I have a single SSD that the system writes to and then every four hours sends the clips to a spinning SAS drive. I get about a month worth of recordings on a 3tb drive with the current config. I also have the option to backup to fileserver if I am going to be gone for like a month or more for training. I have not messed with deep stack or open LPR yet. I am going to play with ONVIF triggers because the cameras have person detection. That said all of my newer cameras are getting equipped with micro SD cards for redundancy. The network is a standard 1gig VLAN dedicated to cameras only. Both ethernet ports on the R410 are used. One for the camera VLAN and one for the home network LAN. Both 10 gig POE switches are connected to a 10gig switch and the router is connected through a 10gig SFP+.

On to the really odd problem. When I open my particular 4k Cameras running H.265 when it switches to the main stream it starts lagging bad. I have lowered the bit rate which has helped and it just studders slightly but still annoying since these cameras support 25 fps 4k. My substream is perfect and at a lower res 15fps is all I need for a wall of cameras. Recording playback is lagging too. The information is recorded but it is hit or miss getting it the playback without artifacts. I could see this all being an issue if the CPU usage was pegged around 90%. I use Blue Iris occasionally with a purpose built system with work and it is not unusual for it to hit 100% CPU useage on the ancient laptop. Yet it still records and the clips are easily exported. It is a very specific build that is only used a couple of times a year.

So, my question about this is this some weird H.265 problem I am getting because I am running this on a Windows Server 12 server without any sort of GPU and it is having issues with H.265? Will throwing in something like a Nvidia 1050 fix the encoding issue? How about something like one of the cheap Intel ARK GPUs since they should support quicksync? Or is there some update required for h.265 to be correctly handled?

[kogashuko]

Just downloaded an H.265 codec pack just to try and that updated directx. As I thought it didnt really do anything. I did not really think it would but not knowing exactly what is called with this software and older hardware I figured it was worth a shot. Overall CPU usage dropped to 9% for some reason.

[TimG]

I think you probably hit the nail on the head with the second sentence. Keyframes are vital. What does BI5 show for keyframes in the settings ? What adjustment - if any - is available from the camera ?

[tommygun]

For what it's worth, I just had a very similar problem when I replaced an old 1080p TrendNet cam with a new 4K Amcrest that supports h.265 natively too. Severe lagging, ghosting of moving images, and very slow playback.

I made two changes at once so I don't know exactly which one fixed it, but it is now working perfectly, as fast and clean as the old 1080p camera was.

1. The camera settings allow you to select an option along with the h.265 stream called "Smart Codec". I turned that option OFF
2. When setting up the camera in BI, the camera model drop down box listed two choices similar to my new camera model. On a whim, I went back and picked the other choice.

I think it was the camera model choice that actually fixed it. Try different similar model choices to the one you have and see if that helps. If it does not, just for testing purposes, pick a "generic" camera model in the setup and try that too.

[HeneryH]

So I am slowly but surely replacing all of my older 720p escam cameras with Reolink cameras. I get they are not optimal ...

So why would you continue to buy more?

[TimG]

Yes, as an Engineer I wouldn't buy Reolink to use with BI5 after having read the forum.

Reminds me of the old joke:
ME: Doctor, every time I do this it hurts.
Doctor: Well don't do it then