Blue Iris - Reduce Resolution and Burden on Tablets

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If your tablet is having difficulty displaying your Blue Iris camera feeds, you might consider reducing the resolution of your feeds or using periodically refreshed image snapshots instead.

This is especially important on lower powered tablets like Amazon Fire Tablets which are a popular choice for displaying dashboards, but are relatively low powered. Displaying MJPEG feeds on Fire Tablets tends to put a decent amount of load on the devices, so there are two primary approaches:

Embed UI3

With the release of Custom Tiles in SharpTools, you can now embed parts of the Blue Iris UI3 interface directly in your dashboards. This is helpful as you can take advantage of all the work the Blue Iris team has done to support modern efficient streaming formats.

These modern formats generally require special players… and you can embed the UI3 interface directly to take advantage of the video players built right into Blue Iris!

:link: How do I get Blue Iris to work in SharpTools? - #7 by josh

URL Parameters

To display a lower resolution stream, you can use a few URL parameters:

  • q = quality (1-100)
  • h = height (px), w = width (px)
    Use w and h together or independently.
  • s = scale (1-100)

Note: The scale (s) parameter may not work on some MJPG feeds, but should work well on image snapshots.

Here are a few examples:

  • /mjpg/{camera-short-name}?q=80&w=640
    Requests a quality of 80% and a width of 640px.

  • /image/{camera-short-name}?s=50
    Requests an image snapshot that is scaled to 50% of its original size.

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Periodic Image Refresh

As an alternative to using MJPG feeds, you might consider using an image snapshot that refreshes periodically. Viewing several MJPG feeds on a lower powered tablet can put a lot of stress on a Fire Tablet. Viewing JPEG snapshots tends to take fewer resources and puts less of a load on the devices.

You can even set the image snaphots to refresh every few seconds. For example, a common approach is to have a local security camera image refresh every 5 seconds.

As noted above, the URL format is:

/image/{camera-short-name}

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Image Snapshot Tile with MJPG when Tapped

One other cool approach is to display the periodically refreshed image snapshot in your tile and then display the MJPEG feed when the tile is clicked. To do this, setup your Media Tile using the image snapshot as normal, then edit the Media Tile to display the MJPG stream when clicked:

  1. While editing your dashboard, tap the ... on your Media Tile and select Edit
  2. Change the Action (Tap) to Open Hyperlink
  3. Enter the URL for your MJPG stream in the Hyperlink field and press save

Now the Media Tile will show an image snapshot that refreshes every few seconds… and when you click on the tile it will open the MJPEG stream.

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