Choppy HLS stream in Home Assistant (UI3 smooth) – recent change?

[Hellurei]

Hi,

I’m trying to troubleshoot a live stream issue that appears to be related to Blue Iris → Home Assistant playback, and I'm hoping someone here might have insights.

Environment​

• Blue Iris version: 6.0.7.43
• Home Assistant: 2026.6.12
• Blue Iris Integration (HA): 2026.6.074
• Stream type: H.264 (via /h264/.../temp.m3u8 HLS stream)

Problem​

Live video playback inside Home Assistant is very choppy:

• Frame updates roughly every ~2 seconds
• Frequent stuttering / buffering behavior
• Occasional black spinner and brief quality drops
• Happens immediately when opening the stream (not after time)

Scope​

• Affects all cameras
• Tested with multiple brands:
  • TP-Link Tapo C325WB
  • Reolink Doorbell
    → so this does not seem camera-specific

Key observation​

• Blue Iris UI3 playback is perfectly smooth
• The issue exists only in Home Assistant, both:
  • Devices view
  • Dashboard cards

Additional notes​

• HA receives a valid stream_source
• Stream is HLS (.m3u8) from Blue Iris
• still_image_url works normally
• No relevant errors:
  • in Home Assistant logs
  • in Blue Iris logs

What changed​

This worked fine until a few weeks ago → smooth playback before.

Current hypothesis​

Since:

• UI3 = smooth
• HA = choppy
• All cameras affected

This seems to point to how HA handles the HLS stream coming from Blue Iris, or a change in how BI generates that stream.

Possible angles I’m considering:

• Changes in Blue Iris HLS segmenting (segment duration / buffering)
• Changes in keyframe interval impacting HLS playback
• HA player being sensitive to HLS timing/latency
• Substream vs main stream behavior differences

Questions​

1. Has anything changed recently in Blue Iris related to HLS generation or buffering?
2. Are there recommended settings for keyframe interval / GOP / iframe spacing when using BI with external HLS clients (like HA)?
3. Any known issues with /h264/.../temp.m3u8 streams and certain players?
4. Would switching to another stream method (e.g. RTSP → HA) be recommended instead of BI HLS?
5. Any tuning parameters in Blue Iris that could reduce latency/choppiness for HLS?

---

If anyone has a similar setup (especially HA + Blue Iris), I’d really appreciate hearing if you’ve seen similar behavior recently.

Thanks!

 

[bp2008]

1. Not that I know of.
2. Default streaming 0 encoder settings should be fine (but you'll want to assign a more useful bit rate target probably).
3. Not that I know of, but HLS is not commonly used with Blue Iris so it does not get a lot of attention.
4. I do think Blue Iris's RTSP server is generally going to be better supported, and it will start up faster because unlike HLS, RTSP was designed to support decently low latency streaming. However depending on how Home Assistant processes the RTSP, you may need to tweak encoder settings, especially the "GOP" (i-frame interval). This information about URL parameters for RTSP requests is 6 years old but should still be valid:
   https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/5-3-1...now-is-also-an-rtsp-server.49571/#post-467956
5. Here are my streaming 0 encoder settings which are working fine:

I just tested it and found it to work fine via the /livestream.htm page available via Blue Iris's web server. You can add a ?cam=shortname URL parameter if you want to load a single camera stream, otherwise the page defaults to loading the All cameras group stream. The livestream page uses an older version of the clappr video player without any modifications (no proprietary changes needed to support Blue Iris's m3u8 (HLS) URLs). So if the streams work there, they should work in any HLS-compatible player.