Subscriber Discussion

Milestone Xprotect Client - No Video

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
May 22, 2018

I am running Milestone Xprotect Client 2018 R1 64-bit and when I login I cannot see any camera images.  The cameras connect and everything runs properly... but the camera images wont come up both in Live and Playback.  I installed the client on a different computer and it works fine, support tells me that it is likely my video card but I find this odd because I can run any other client without any problems (Avigilon, HIK, ExacQ, etc).

Anybody have this issue?

Avatar
Sean Patton
May 22, 2018

Sounds like a Windows Firewall issue. Can you email me your ticket number with Milestone? sean@ipvm.com

(1)
UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
May 22, 2018

I tried turning off my firewall and no luck.  I didn't open a ticket but I worked with a solution engineer that helped out.  He spoke with engineering and said that they "unanimously agree that it is likely a video card issue". 

Avatar
Sean Patton
May 22, 2018

Did they have you try disabling hardware acceleration?

Avatar
Jared Tarter
May 22, 2018
Milestone Systems

Like Sean mentioned, try turning off hardware acceleration to see if that solves the issue.

If it does, then there are a few things to try:

 - First is update your video card drivers.  This would include any discrete video cards (nVidia, AMD, Matrox, etc.) as well as your Intel GPU drivers if your CPU has an embedded GPU.  The easiest way to tell the latter is to look in Device Management and see if there is an Intel GPU listed under Display Adapters.  Once all of the drivers are updated, enable the Hardware Acceleration again in the Smart Client.

 - If updating all of the GPU drivers doesn't resolve the issue and you have an nVidia card, it is possible that the card is too low-end to handle the decoding.  Essentially, it might be trying but just can't process it.  To rule that out, close the Smart Client, navigate to C:\Program Files\Milestone\XProtect Smart Client\ and open Client.exe.config in Notepad.  Do a search for "FallThroughPriority" and change the "AutoNvidia" to "OnlyIntel".  Then save the file and try the Smart Client again.  This will force it to only use the Intel GPU (if available) or the CPU.  The full line you are looking for looks like this:

<add key="FallThroughPriority" value="AutoNvidia" />

If that resolves the issue then I would concur with our tech support that the issue is likely your video card.  You can leave the setting at "OnlyIntel" so it doesn't try to decode to the nVidia card (it will still use it for rendering if the monitors are attached to it).

(1)
(2)
Avatar
Mike Dotson
May 23, 2018
Formerly of Seneca • IPVMU Certified

To go along with the 'low end' suggestion from Jared, I know that the current drivers from NVidia have perfmon counters that can be used to answer this question.

Open perfmon up and look for counter names that start with NVIDIA and add all of them.

The most interesting ones are the Video Decoder, GPU Usage, GPU Memory.   A simple rule is that if any of these is more than 80%, the code will start looking for other ways to decode the streams.   Also be sure to look at the CPU usage.   If your system has a QSYNC CPU, you need to use GPUZ to see the usage.  Note that the Win10 OS now shows GPU metrics in the Task manager performance, but does not record anything.

Below is a sample from a system that has multiple cards in it.NVIDIA-Perfmon Counters

(1)
UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
May 23, 2018

Thanks for all the suggestions.  I can try to update my drivers but disabling hardware acceleration wont happen because it is a Milestone Demo site that we are using to connect to and show our potential clients.

Avatar
Jared Tarter
May 23, 2018
Milestone Systems

I'm assuming you are referring to our public demo site.  If so, you are correct that you won't be able to disable the hardware acceleration via the Settings menu because we have that locked down but you could still do the settings change in the Client.exe.config file because that will only affect your local client.  I would still try updating the drivers first though.

Thanks

Avatar
Mike Dotson
May 23, 2018
Formerly of Seneca • IPVMU Certified

Note that the HA-off setting that Sean showed is on the Client machine...not the server machine. 

It appears you have your own client machine so you can do that.

BTW... for demo purposes, I suggest installing the free version on one of your machines so you can show all the features and not have to login to a demo server.

 

 

 

New discussion

Ask questions and get answers to your physical security questions from IPVM team members and fellow subscribers.

Newest discussions