H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Discussions related to the 1.36.x series of ZoneMinder
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theogre
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue May 25, 2021 4:51 am

H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by theogre »

I recently upgraded from 1.34 to 1.36 and other than a few issues getting things up and running, it's been going okay.

However I have run into a pretty annoying issue with 1.36 where the stream is choppy for my 5mp streams (RLC-520's)

Monitors are 6fps in Record mode, but live view and events shows a frame or two, then pauses, and skips ahead a few seconds before showing a few more frames. It's a very unpleasant thing to view considering this worked just fine before the upgrade.

Using any sort of encoding for the storage results in a non-choppy playback and live view but has the costly side affect of eating CPU cycles. Enabling HWACCEL with vaapi makes the situation even worse with the same choppiness, but also flashing back and forth in time with lots of distortion. Have tried disabling audio and other quick fixes to no avail. RTSP vs RTMP, TCP vs UDP vs HTTP makes no difference

Lower bitrate/resolution streams from the same camera work just fine, and my other 1080p streams from other cameras work just fine without the hitching.



Update: Seems to just have been a Maximum Image Buffer Size issue. I had it set 25 before and that worked fine, something must've changed the requirements. Setting it to 0 increased ram usage unfortunately, but the choppiness is now gone
Last edited by theogre on Tue May 25, 2021 5:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Bearded_Beef
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:51 pm

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by Bearded_Beef »

I came here this morning to say the same thing. Never had a problem before.

theogre, did you say you fixed it by *lowering* the maximum buffer size?
Magic919
Posts: 1381
Joined: Wed Sep 18, 2013 6:56 am

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by Magic919 »

This thread is worth a look. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30781
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Bearded_Beef
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:51 pm

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by Bearded_Beef »

Magic919 wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 2:56 pm This thread is worth a look. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30781
Yeah I have followed these guidlines but Im still getting some glitchiness on events. RN I have set minimum to 5 and max to 75. Originally it was 50 before the update and everything was smooth as butter.
Bearded_Beef
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:51 pm

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by Bearded_Beef »

FWIW some of my videos error out, saying that they are either corrupted or not supported by my browser. I remember going through something like this before I had https set up.
theogre
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue May 25, 2021 4:51 am

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by theogre »

Bearded_Beef wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 1:29 pm I came here this morning to say the same thing. Never had a problem before.

theogre, did you say you fixed it by *lowering* the maximum buffer size?
Not so much lowering it, but setting it to 0 allows for automatic adjustment as high as it needs. You can try manually raising it until you find the stream is smooth, but I chose to go with 0 for auto adjust

Also try using 3 instead of 5 for your Image Buffer Size. I had issues with 5 and setting it to 3 resolved it.
Bearded_Beef
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:51 pm

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by Bearded_Beef »

Thanks man. I had no idea my cameras were so memory hungry! Setting it to 0 immediately made my server slow to a crawl. You'd think 16 GB for 4 streams would be plenty but maybe this is due to the memory leak issues?
theogre
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue May 25, 2021 4:51 am

Re: H264 Passthrough choppy recordings and live view

Post by theogre »

Bearded_Beef wrote: Wed May 26, 2021 3:57 pm Thanks man. I had no idea my cameras were so memory hungry! Setting it to 0 immediately made my server slow to a crawl. You'd think 16 GB for 4 streams would be plenty but maybe this is due to the memory leak issues?
It very well could be, I just posted a new topic about a memory leak issue, as this issue has sprung it's head up again with events being choppy and the server running out of ram.
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