Problems With Blue Iris 3.62.04

upstatemike

Senior Member
Lately I am having a lot of problems with Blue Iris 3.62.04 crashing on me. I have to restart the program multiple times per day. I only have 6 cameras and I have reduced the frame rate on everything to 15 fps and set the program to record direct to disk without trans-coding but my CPU level still sits between 88 and 100%. Running on a Windows 10 laptop with AMD A6-5200 2.00 GHz and 8GB of RAM. 
 
Any thoughts on what i can tweak to resolve this?
 
The first thing I would do is upgrade to Blueiris v4.x.x . V4 is more stable than V3 and has better memory management.
 
42etus said:
The first thing I would do is upgrade to Blueiris v4.x.x . V4 is more stable than V3 and has better memory management.
 
I have been hesitating because it is not a free upgrade and I don't want to throw good money after bad if that is not going to fix it. I wonder if it would be better to look into a hardware NVR?
 
When you say "Lately" it implies that this is a new problem. Was BI running fine before? What changed? Does BI crash by itself or does it bring the whole computer down?

Also,

There are documented issues that some Windows video drivers don't release memory correctly and eventually cause a crash. I had that issue and needed to experiment with different drivers until I found one that was stable and turned off auto update.
 
It only crashes the program, not the computer. Used to be occasional but suddenly many times per day. The change is that I replaced some cameras but I made sure to drop the frame rate down on the new ones to 15fps. They are at a higher resolution though so I guess that could be the root cause. Still, 6 h.264 cameras is not excessive and if BI can't handle that I don't know that a newer version is likely to solve the problem. 
 
H.264 really doesn't matter; there are many different bitrates that it supports.  It also supports up to 8k.  Bitrate wise it can be from 64Kbps all the way to 800,000Kbps.
 
What cameras (resolution and MP) did you have before and what do you have now?
 
From Blue Iris:
https://ipcamtalk.com/wiki/choosing-hardware-for-blue-iris/
 
4-core CPUs are sufficient for most users. If you want to run more than about 40 megapixels worth of cameras (10x 4MP cameras, or 20x 2 MP cameras), or use particularly high frame rates, then choose an i7 or 6-core i5.
 
So while you might have kept the bitrate the same, with the higher MP cameras you are giving more information that Blue Iris needs to process.  A laptop system isn't designed for speed either and many are not able to maintain performance when they start to get warm.  Have you also cleaned the system out recently as dust loves to get into the heatsinks which cause components to run hotter which then impacts performance.
 
Have you reached out to the developer to get his take on it?
 
I had 6 640X480 Panasonic cameras and replaced 5 of them with 1920X1080 SV3C cameras. A big jump in resolution but not a lot of cameras so I wasn't expecting the PC would be struggling. I don't really want to drop back to 640X480. I'll get a can of air and blow out the PC vents to see what that does.
 
I'm not a BI expert, but that is not just a big jump in resolution as much as it is a big jump in bandwidth for BI to process. With the camera change, it is going from about 1.6 Mb/s to about 10.5 Mb/s with that resolution and framerate (assuming h.264 for both sets of cameras. I would suggest enabling direct to disk for each camera (overlays would have to be set directly in the individual camera) and lowering framerate to reduce the load on your system.
 
TheWolf56 said:
I'm not a BI expert, but that is not just a big jump in resolution as much as it is a big jump in bandwidth for BI to process. With the camera change, it is going from about 1.6 Mb/s to about 10.5 Mb/s with that resolution and framerate (assuming h.264 for both sets of cameras. I would suggest enabling direct to disk for each camera (overlays would have to be set directly in the individual camera) and lowering framerate to reduce the load on your system.
 
Already switched to "direct to disk" on all cameras and dropped the frame rate on the new cameras from 25 to 15.
 
Looks like I need to start shopping for some sort of 12 core liquid cooled overclocked PC with high end video hardware and tons of memory to support these six cameras on Blue Iris!
 
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