Hello all,
We’ve just completed a pretty major upgrade, and we’re experiencing very choppy video at all of our smart clients. I’ve been working with my integrator to correct the issue, he’s spoken with milestone phone support and they’ve discovered that making the following setting changes seem to help.
First we disable Hardware acceleration in the advanced tab of the options menu.
Then what we do is under setup, in the properties pane, we set ‘Image quality’ to ‘full’ and the ‘frame rate’ to ‘unlimited’. These settings changes seem to fix our problem. I can do this internally to my support areas, however, I’d like to fix it across campus so that other technical support for other departments don’t have to spend their time doing one off changes. I’ve found what I believe to be the corresponding settings in the milestone management client in the Smart Client Profiles, however, they don’t seem to be making the changes on the user end. Is there anyway that I can make these settings take effect for all of the clients?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Michael,
your feedback is very much welcome.
I would like to encourage you to create a support ticket (if you do not already have one) so that we can further investigate the issue.
As we would like to know more:
- is it choppy only in playback?
- if so, is it only if you playback footage belonging to the time after the upgrade?
- Affected hardware: all the same? (did you upgrade in the same machine? no changes here? no windows updates and so on.. etc..?
In regards to the Smart Client profiles in your Management Client, yes: in the “Advanced” tab you will be able to select “Hardware Acceleration” from “Auto” to “Off” as desired and in the General tab the “Default frame rate” and “Default image quality” (usually set to “Unlimited” and “Full” respectively by default).
If you can not get these Smart Client profiles to work, do create a support ticket as this should not be a problem whatsoever.
Make sure you select the Roles to use your new Smart Client profile.
Hi Raul,
Thank you for your reply. As per your questions, no the video is choppy when in both playback *and* in live view. Affected hardware is *not* the same, we’ve upgraded the Operating system on the master server from 2008r2 to 2012r2 as well as moving it into a new vlan.
I will have my Integrator open a support ticket.
Thanks again.
Great to hear. We have made some recent improvements that should help.
This is an older question but it has not been marked as solved and has caught my eye.
Firstly, there is a hotfix available for all versions of XProtect Advanced 2016 products (2016, 2016 R2 and 2016 R3). It’s important to apply this. Here is the KB article (https://goo.gl/JqOYpV) .
Second, I would be very cautious changing the image quality settings in your views in Smart Client. This causes the Recording Server(s) to transcode the video in realtime, and will result in a drastic increase in CPU usage on the Recording Servers, especially if multiple users are online at once. High CPU on the Recording Server can result in dropped frames and slow response/playback.
If changing this setting results in better playback on the client systems, then I suspect the problem is that the CPU usage on the clients were too high earlier. By changing the image quality setting, the Recording Server converts the h264 stream to MJPEG which is easier on the CPU to decode/display. If the client systems are running high on CPU usage unexpectedly, I would check to see if the systems match the recommendation based on the project specifications if available, or contact support to see if hardware decoding is simply not working as expected.