Blue Iris UI3

[bp2008]

In UI3, When I right click on any camera (in a group... while live view, or timeline, or clips are selected, ) and choose "Group Settings", all I see is:

View attachment 242001

I can't seem to find any place with the settings choices you talk about... someplace else?

That camera group is most likely configured to be a fixed aspect ratio in Blue Iris, which disables UI3's ability to demand its own aspect ratio.

Use Blue Iris's edit layout button, then right click in its video area and find the group-level aspect ratio control.

 

[rdxny]

That camera group is most likely configured to be a fixed aspect ratio in Blue Iris, which disables UI3's ability to demand its own aspect ratio.

Use Blue Iris's edit layout button, then right click in its video area and find the group-level aspect ratio control.

yup.. I had group aspect in the console set to 4:3 to give me a better look when clips were showing at left, but that messed with UI3. Thanks

 

[erkme73]

I've recently started experiencing increase in the player delay when playing back clips. It does it nearly every time on my PC (higher end) but also on my android phone.

The attached video is cropped to show only the stats for nerds and the status bar (bottom left). What's odd is that the video itself seems to play just fine. But when the delay gets too long, I get the orange clock, yellow HTML5 warning, and then the clip restarts to the point just before the delay started. It's very frustrating.

Does this happen to anyone else? What could be causing it? Is it server or client related?

I am on latest BI and 319 of UI

Thanks!

ETA: I did notice that this seems to only happen at 1x playback. At 2x or higher, it doesn't have the delay (more than 200ms). I have setting set to use sub-stream at 16x or more, so it's still streaming main stream at 2x w/o delay.

 

[bp2008]

@erkme73 Try a different H.264 player in UI Settings. Looks like the HTML5 player is just stalling.

 

[rdxny]

@bp2008: I sometimes try to scrub through a whole night's recordings quickly in the console, but because I have recordings broken into a new file every 2 hours, the scrubbing stops at the 2 hour mark, and I have to re-maximize the camera I'm looking at to continue (and sometimes replace the cursor to the right time on the timeline, a pain. But in UI3, I can scrub through the entire night, past the 2 hour breaks seamlessly, a way better experience! So thanks

 

[erkme73]

@erkme73 Try a different H.264 player in UI Settings. Looks like the HTML5 player is just stalling.

That absolutely fixes it! I was reluctant to move to the java/h264, thinking it was less efficient or somehow more dated. Is there anything I can do to make html5 run without stalling?

 

[bp2008]

That absolutely fixes it! I was reluctant to move to the java/h264, thinking it was less efficient or somehow more dated. Is there anything I can do to make html5 run without stalling?

It is less efficient. And technically more dated. You are correct on both points.

Trouble is I have no way of knowing what is causing the HTML5 video player to stall. You could try a different web browser, or in an incognito/private window with no browser extensions running. Or maybe updating video drivers on the affected computer.

An alternative to the JavaScript player would be the WebCodecs player. It is about as efficient as the HTML5 player, but in my experience it is slightly more buggy, and you need to be connected with HTTPS in order to use it. Blue Iris supports HTTPS natively now or you could use a reverse proxy server of which there are many, many options to choose from.

 

[erkme73]

It is less efficient. And technically more dated. You are correct on both points.

Trouble is I have no way of knowing what is causing the HTML5 video player to stall. You could try a different web browser, or in an incognito/private window with no browser extensions running. Or maybe updating video drivers on the affected computer.

An alternative to the JavaScript player would be the WebCodecs player. It is about as efficient as the HTML5 player, but in my experience it is slightly more buggy, and you need to be connected with HTTPS in order to use it. Blue Iris supports HTTPS natively now or you could use a reverse proxy server of which there are many, many options to choose from.

I think I will continue to explore what is making the HTML5 stall... One deal breaker is the lack of PIP on the h264. Seems to be a bit laggy too on switching from a group view to a single full screen.

Thanks for giving me some more things to try.

 

[Tinman]

It is less efficient. And technically more dated. You are correct on both points.

Trouble is I have no way of knowing what is causing the HTML5 video player to stall. You could try a different web browser, or in an incognito/private window with no browser extensions running. Or maybe updating video drivers on the affected computer.

An alternative to the JavaScript player would be the WebCodecs player. It is about as efficient as the HTML5 player, but in my experience it is slightly more buggy, and you need to be connected with HTTPS in order to use it. Blue Iris supports HTTPS natively now or you could use a reverse proxy server of which there are many, many options to choose from.

I have been getting all the time since the last Edge update or also have been on the last couple of BI updates. Not sure which is the culprit, but never had any of this before?

 

[erkme73]

That's what is so frustrating - it was working great until recently. I'm on Brave with all shields disabled. It also does it on my android phone on Brave browser (though less often).

 

[Tinman]

I just reverted back to 6.0.4.4 which I ran for few weeks when ken was working on IOS app and never saw this issue back then. But just now when i tried 6.0.4.4 I am still getting this error. makes me think something in Edge got changed.

 

[erkme73]

I just tried it with Chrome (vs. Brave) and got similar stalling - just not as often. Tired it in private/incognito. Same. Maybe it'll get tracked down in the near future.

 

[Tinman]

Well, just to rule out possible issues, I updated video drivers to latest and running latest Edge build and still get the same issue. I also tried another computer altogether that has always worked with UI3 and it now produces the same error. Evidently BI has changed something?? I attached some nerd screen shots in case it helps bp2008, but its beyond me.

 

[bp2008]

Ok so this is a tricky issue with a long history.

Years and years ago (surely 5+ years) I would have the video randomly freeze when using the HTML5 player, mainly in Android Chrome. Nobody ever complained about this issue to me so I don't think it was super widespread, but I had it happen all the time, got fed up, and programmed UI3 to detect when the HTML5 video player stops firing "timeupdate" events, which allowed me to work around the issue by restarting the video stream. That is why you get the popup message about the stall, and the stream keeps pausing to buffer (that is the stream restarting). It is also why the "Player delay" item in Stats for nerds begins rising.

Trouble is, lately I have been seeing these video player stall detections actually be a false positive. That is where the video has not actually frozen, but UI3 doesn't know it because the video element just stopped indicating that it was making progress and leaves UI3 figuratively in the dark about any video playback progress that is actually happening. This seems to be what happens in @erkme73's video. I happens very infrequently for me and usually on Android Chrome where I can't really do anything about it. If I could reproduce the issue reliably I could probably find another workaround. But I can't reproduce it on demand.

What it boils down to is that HTML5 video implementations vary wildly depending which web browser you use, its version, which operating system you are on, what hardware acceleration is available, what drivers are installed, etc. It is a very complex system with many opportunities for problems that can appear in various ways. Being able to track down most bugs in that system is way beyond my pay grade. So I just do my best to provide multiple H.264 video player options so that people have choices if one isn't working right.

If you use the JavaScript player, it is less efficient for sure, but I've never seen it stall like the HTML5 player does and generally it is just less problematic because it never gets updated and it relies on much less of the complex software stacks that video on the web is built upon.

WebCodecs as I recently described above, is a more modern more efficient alternative to the JavaScript player but in my experience it is slighly more buggy in general. If it works reliably on systems where the HTML5 player does not, then it is absolutely worth using it.

I do have a lead on a possibly (maybe) more reliable way to detect video player progress. There's a relatively new API method for code to be notified when a video frame is rendered: HTMLVideoElement: requestVideoFrameCallback() method - Web APIs | MDN But I don't know when I will have time to implement anything with it and there's no guarantee it will help with this issue.

 

[Tinman]

First off, thanks for the explanation Bp2008. Done for today, but i did find that Chrome is doing the same thing Edge is doing. For kicks I installed Pale Moon and ran the cam for 15 minutes without the error. Just a FYI, not sure if it helps. Maybe Edge will update again soon and it will work again. It does work fine using java as you suggested.

 

[erkme73]

I concur @bp2008 - thank you for that detailed explanation. Even if there isn't a fix, it's helps a lot to know that the issue isn't just on one or two systems.

To your point, when stats for nerds shows the delay growing in real-time, the video is playing without hiccup. It is the auto stall detection that causes it to reset. Mine is set to 6 seconds. And sometimes, that's about when it resets, but other times, it'll go 30 seconds or more. It is very inconsistent. But it does happen with the Android Brave app, and PC Brave and Chrome (latest).

I appreciate your explanation and hope at some point it gets resolved one way or the other. In the mean time I'll just roll with it. I have to have the PIP (my kids watch for the school bus while I us my PC).

ETA: Just an idea - but if these warnings and restarts are false positives (in my case), is there a way to disable the warning and restart completely? I just checked and it appears the max are as follows:

 

[erkme73]

WIth the above settings (warning at 30, reset at 180) I'm still getting resets. But as you can see, even though it's reporting 0FPS, the video is actually playing (at 10FPS).

 

[Techie007L]

I just tried it with Chrome (vs. Brave) and got similar stalling - just not as often. Tired it in private/incognito. Same. Maybe it'll get tracked down in the near future.

No surprise there—Brave and Edge are just different skins for Chrome. They're all Chromium underneath the hood, and aggressively updated (they all check at least once an hour). Any bugs/quirks rolled out to the web engine should be expected to affect all three of them very quickly. If you want something actually different, you need to switch to a different platform, such as the Gecko family of web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, LibreWolf, Waterfox), or the WebKit family of web browsers (Safari).

 

[Tinman]

Just to help clarify the issue, my video does not stop as well. This video shows Edge on left and Pale Moon on right. Both are using the HTML5. Notice that even though the error message pops up the video keeps going.

 

[Tinman]

No surprise there—Brave and Edge are just different skins for Chrome. They're all Chromium underneath the hood, and aggressively updated (they all check at least once an hour). Any bugs/quirks rolled out to the web engine should be expected to affect all three of them very quickly. If you want something actually different, you need to switch to a different platform, such as the Gecko family of web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, LibreWolf, Waterfox), or the WebKit family of web browsers (Safari).

Hoping someone figures out its broken and updates it again