Hi completely new to Sharp Tools and loving it. I’ve followed all the advice on this forum and managed to get all my IP cameras (connected to a Lorex NVR) in to BlueIris and have url’s which work in any web browser. I’ve created the Media with the url pointing to the BlueIris computer which is running however when I try to add a tile using the media created I get a message which says “Failed to load media”. Can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Many thanks
John
During the creation and editing of the Media item, if the URL you are using is HTTP rather than HTTPS, you should see a blue warning message like the following:
If you tap on the Learn More link in the warning message or on one of the tiles that failed to load the media item, you would be taken to the following page with more details describing how to resolve common issues with “Mixed Media”:
Note that if you are not using a valid HTTPS URL with Blue Iris, then each browser would need to have the Mixed Content settings adjusted accordingly.
Thanks Josh that’s really helpful but I couldn’t get any of the options suggested to work as although the camera url’s in chrome did say “!Not secure” the images were in fact displayed. It’s only when I try to load them into a chrome page on my pc displaying my dashboard that I get the problem. In any event I have I think worked round it as I was only using the pc to create my dashboard. In fact I display the dashboard on Android tablets using Fully Kiosk. So I edited the dashboard on the pc just using the camera media tiles as placeholder tiles knowing that they would display correctly on the tablets.
If anyone has any other thoughts please let me know.
However many thanks for the help.
Which options did you try and did you get stuck on any steps? It’s very likely that it’s a Mixed Content issue based on your description.
With Mixed Media blocking, the media URL would successfully display when you view it directly in your browser… but the media URL would fail to display when embedded in a secure page (like your dashboard).
The first step is updating the mixed content setting to Allow ‘Insecure Content’ specifically for sharptools.io (under Site Settings near the URL bar in Chrome).
If you are also using an IP address to access your Blue Iris instance, you must also use one of the special wildcard domains like our own st-ip.net or a third party like nip.io per the red stop-sign callout at the top of the post thanks to a weird bug introduced in Chrome that’s yet to be resolved by Google.
So if you had a URL for Blue Iris like the following:
http://192.168.1.11:81/mjpg/Emily
It would become the following with the st-ip.net wildcard domain:
http://192.168.1.11.st-ip.net:81/mjpg/Emily
^^^^^^^^^^
Thanks again Josh that’s brilliant I didn’t pick up on step 2 which did the trick.
Cheers
Hi again sorry to come back on this but something strange has now happened. I had to change the DNS addresses on my router to google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as it seemed to be the issue with some problems I was having with smartthings. Now using the http://192.168.1.11.st-ip.net:81/mjpg/Emily format displays the camera images on my PC using chrome but not on my android tablets using Fully. I’ve changed the settings in Fully to “Always allow mixed content”. Conversely using http://192.168.1.11:81/mjpg/Emily works on the tablets but not the pc.
Any idea what is happening - I’d prefer not to change my router DNS addresses back to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 as restarting the router seems to wreaks havoc with Smartthings for me!
It looks like Google’s DNS randomly capitalizes letters in the DNS query which our wildcard DNS resolver wasn’t handling. I’ve pushed an update to the st-ip.net DNS resolver to better handle this case.
Can you try again?
PS. If your network or computer aggressively caches DNS requests, you might have to wait a bit to see this take effect.
Thanks Josh that seems to have done the trick but to be honest I’m now having a problem with Blue Iris which I know is not connected to to SharpTools. I did an update of the app and now it doesn’t stay open for more than a few mins. Not even long enough for me to access the settings. I know this is likely to be something with my pc and I’ll try to contact BI for help if I can’t work it out but I’ve tried the obvious things like creating exceptions in my AntiVirus and windows firewall.
If anyone else here has had a similar problem with BI I’d love to hear how they resolved it.
Many thanks
Just tried uninstalling BI and reinstalling from a fresh download - it remembered my settings but crashed shortly after loading
What version did the fresh download use? I wonder if it’s possible to reinstall the specific older version you had?
The downloads were only a few days apart (last weekend and today) so they were the same versions. I just wondered if there might have been something wrong with the original download.
Both were 5.9.8.4
Cheers
OK so I uninstalled and deleted the Perspective Software Registry key. Restarted and ran install. Still found Blue Iris 5 folder so opted to install to a new folder.
That got me back to no license position. Entered license key and gave a name to the setup and set authorisation to Non-Lan. Saved. Crash. Opened again and then restored the first backup file from the original install. Up for 20 mins and crash.
CPU constantly at 100% don’t know if that’s an issue.
Cheers
Probably not the right place to post this but in case anyone is interested - touch wood I think it may now be sorted. Obviously the 100% CPU usage was not good. I went through all the options given by BI to reduce it and they didn’t work. That included creating subsreams and making sure they were broadcast at 15 fps. I have a Lorex system with NVR and cameras so have no need to record video with BI so turned that and audio off too. That didn’t change anything either. So eventually I decided to copy the subtream url (if that’s what it’s called) to the main stream box. Hey presto that reduced CPU usage to about 40%! So let’s see how long the system stays up!
Getting the substreams to work in the first place was a challenge by the way until I found a thread that said that Lorex cameras are rebadged Dahua cameras and they use subtype 2 instead of 1.
Also for the only internal wifi camera I have (the others are all identical POE direct connections to the NVR) it would only work if both mainstream and substream were set to subtype 0.
NB for all the cameras the Cam# setting in the configuration menu was set to 1 when a substream was present. These were the url’s that worked for me. For my camera 2 (channel 2):
Main stream: “/cam/realmonitor?channel=2&subtype=0&unicast=true&proto=Onvif”
Sub stream: “/cam/realmonitor?channel=2&subtype=2&unicast=true&proto=Onvif”
Thanks eveyone for your help.
Just a quick supplementary camera question. Are there any different settings that need to be set to allow the camera images to be seen when viewing the dashboard on an iOS tablet?
Cheers