Video Motion Artifacts?

[getrealbro]

I’m new to video and would like help understanding what causes motion artifacts like the ones in the attached video.

Details:
The video was shot with an Amcrest IP2M-841B security camera that I’m using to monitor wildlife. VLC (running on a 2018 i7 Mini) captured the RTSP stream and both displayed the stream and saved it as mp4. The attached video clip was trimmed using the Edit>Split Clip menu option in QuickTime Player.

Thanks in Advance - GetRealBro

 

[getrealbro]

I’m pretty sure the motion artifacts are not produced by the camera itself. The following video shows the Amcrest Web View and the VLC RTSP display in a cropped screen recording.

The Amcrest Web View and RTSP are a little out of sync. But they are close enough to see that the Amcrest Web View does NOT have the any of the motion artifacts in the VLC display of the RTSP feed.

So the question is whether the Amcrest RTSP feed is corrupt or is VLC just not capturing the RTSP feed correctly?

GetRealBro

 

[getrealbro]

This screen recording compares the simultaneous display of the same Amcrest IP2M-841 camera with two different apps using two different protocols.
- the IP Camera Recorder app (on the left) is using HTTP and saving to MOV
- the VLC app (on the right) is using RTSP and saving to MP4

This pretty much confirms that the motion artifacts are due to either…
- a corrupt RTSP feed from the Amcrest camera or
- a problem with VLC .

Can anyone tell me the URL to get VLC to use the HTTP Protocol with an Amcrest IP camera?

GetRealBro

 

[ColdCase]

Are both apps grabing the same resolution?

My experience has been that this stutter is usually a computer problem with the resources the player (app) demands (they all seem to be different). If you run it on a higher performance computer you will probably see less of a problem. If VLC is doing additional processing to create the mp4 file, that takes more resources. Are the recorded file sizes the same? Can you change the format VLC saves the video in?

The other thing that you may notice when viewing multiple camera live feeds is the video will become out of time sync, one window will be minutes later than another.

 

[getrealbro]

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. To answer your questions…

1 - The IP Camera Recorder app and VLC app are capturing the same resolution video stream —1080P.

2 - VLC saves the video to an .MP4 (or .ts) file. IP Camera Recorder saves the video to a series of 1 minute .MOV files, that can be later exported into hour long .MOV files. This makes it difficult to directly compare file sizes. But they both store roughly 30-32MB/minute of video.

3 - The video output of both apps is being written to an external Samsung T5 SSD by a 2018 Mac Mini 3.8 GHz 6 core i7 running Mojave 10.14.6.

4 - I monitor system resources on a 2nd monitor 24/7 via Intel Power Gadget, Activity Monitor (CPU History) and Peak Hour 4 (network activity). The short screen recording above, includes Peak Hour 4 (Mini18 - 2nd graph down on the left) with roughly 1.5MB/s being downloaded from the Amcrest camera and minimal CPU load on the 6 cores (Intel Power Gadget - upper right and Activity Monitor CPU History - lower right). The IP Camera Recorder app’s video is in the upper middle, with the VLC app’s video below it. Note: the IP Camera Recorder video is artifact free, while the VLC video has motion artifacts.

5 - VLC can save the video steam to several formats e.g. .mp4 and .ts. BUT the resulting .ts files have the same type of motion artifacts as the .mp4, are larger and require post processing to convert them to .mp4 which allows QuickTime Player to scrub back and forth. FWIW QuickTime Player has crashed every time i’ve tried to back up on a .ts file.

GetRealBro

 

[ColdCase]

I can't explain it. Just saying that, in my experience, when live viewing 4K RTSP streams from security cameras, even my 3GHz Xeon W 10 core with Pro Vega 64 iMac Pro with 32 GB RAM will eventually start to stutter and show video artifacts all the while indicating low CPU use. What about GPU? Dunno. It will happen sooner when viewing multiple streams, and varies from one app to another. Recorded video varies.

The iMac performs better than my 2.3 GHz 4 Core i7 MacPro with Iris graphics, however. The MBP will eventually choke on one 1080p stream. The MBP fans will spin up a bit, similar to being on ZOOM calls or while download big files. My recent MB Air wants to fly away with fans blazing, I guess thats why they call it an Air. iOS apps seem to perform much better in this case. For grins you may want to try an iPad or iPhone if you have one.

Its been months since the last time I played with it but I dunno if its MacOS, the codecs the security camera uses, or ffmpeg or the app/api architecture I tried several vendor's NVR type software and I just could not find a satisfactory product. The vendor tech support typically blaming the specific cameras I was using, the camera vendor saying it must be the viewer. They seemed to work fine when the cameras were set to low resolution SD video streams.

But then I am trying to use 8 of my security cameras to keep an eye on game/critters, foxes raiding the hen house.... There is quite a bit more activity out there than I thought. Some of the critters have quite the personality.

I've moved on to a integrated NVR/camera solution where I can scrub through recorded video and download sections to the mac and view without artifacts and distribute. Live streaming can still be an issue, however.

 

[getrealbro]

I can't explain it. Just saying that, in my experience, when live viewing 4K RTSP streams from security cameras, even my 3GHz Xeon W 10 core with Pro Vega 64 iMac Pro with 32 GB RAM will eventually start to stutter and show video artifacts all the while indicating low CPU use. What about GPU? Dunno. It will happen sooner when viewing multiple streams, and varies from one app to another. Recorded video varies......

Thanks again for the info on your live streaming experiences.

I’m only using 2 Amcrest cameras to monitor wildlife. So I’m hoping I can do this with VLC and a “spare” 2014 Mini with lots of external drives

I’m still thinking the motion artifacts are due to the way VLC is handling the Amcrest RTSP stream. IP Camera Reporter, which has zero motion artifacts, uses HTTP protocol and Live555 driver. I haven’t sucessfully gotten VLC to use HTTP let alone Live555

GetRealBro