Understanding setup

Chuck Claunch

Chuck Claunch

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Dec 23, 2015
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Hello, I have a computer that acts as a media center that I plan to install Blue Iris to. Right now I only have one camera but plan to add a few more. The computer is a i7-920 w/8GB ram and I managed to snag a 10TB Seagate Seahawk hard drive to stick in it (I'm a reviewer). I mostly run this computer headless, though it is hooked up to the TV running windows media center with a HD Homerun for doing the occasional TV recordings. I figured with this fancy hard drive it should be fine for some TV recording alongside the video cameras. My main question is, is it easy enough with BI to manage the cameras and view them/view recordings from another PC, or do I really need to install the drive and BI to the computer I plan to watch/manage the cameras from?

As a side question, should I format the drive with any specific settings like allocation unit sizes?
 
The i7-920 is a relatively weak processor and more importantly power hungry..it wont run BI well if you plan on running multi megapixel cameras.
You would be better off buying a dedicated i5-haswell or skylake with intel hd for 200-300...
Any vms is best run on a dedicated pc.
 
This would be pretty much a dedicated pc. The question is, do you configure/manage BI from the dedicated PC? E.g. remote desktop? Or are you using the web interface to handle that? I'm not terribly worried about power. The machine has been run 24-7 for a very long time and is pretty much already a part of my electric bill :)
 
Chuck Claunch said:
This would be pretty much a dedicated pc. The question is, do you configure/manage BI from the dedicated PC? E.g. remote desktop? Or are you using the web interface to handle that? I'm not terribly worried about power. The machine has been run 24-7 for a very long time and is pretty much already a part of my electric bill :)
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Yes you need to use some form of remote desktop. It would be cheaper for you to buy another pc to replace the i7-920. An i5-haswell is much more powerful and can take advantage of hardware acceleration. Put your pc on a power meter and you will see that the new system will pay for itself in under two years...
 
the main thing is hardware acceleration, it gives you a massive performance boost while reducing power consumption.. especially if you want to dual-purpose the machine for TV Recording.. your i7 could be churning through power at 80% load and it would be consuming much more power than it has been on your electric bill... have you really been running a high load on it continuously, non stop? or has it been mostly idle and relatively low power consumption.. i7 970 @ idle is 100w.. at load its near 200w, thats just cpu.. add a discrete video card and your total footprint could be over 300w loaded while many people here have i5 haswell BI servers under 60w loaded that will run circles around you.

as long as your OS HDD is not shared with your recording storage, it should not be a problem using a drive for multiple storage tasks.. you might want to partition it accordingly as recordings tend to try to use up all avilable disk space.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'm really curious though (speaking as a software engineer who's built some pretty robust IP video systems in the past), what on Earth is Blue Iris doing that's running an i7 920 at 80% 24-7? I know it doesn't take that much CPU to simply save video. After all, the whole point of IP cameras is that they do the heavy lifting (encoding) for you. Is it the motion capture algorithms or something?
 
Chuck Claunch said:
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'm really curious though (speaking as a software engineer who's built some pretty robust IP video systems in the past), what on Earth is Blue Iris doing that's running an i7 920 at 80% 24-7? I know it doesn't take that much CPU to simply save video. After all, the whole point of IP cameras is that they do the heavy lifting (encoding) for you. Is it the motion capture algorithms or something?
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Have you tweaked the usual settings of D2D and enabled the hardware acceleration? I know its an obvious question but some people forget to do that.
 
PSPCommOp said:
Have you tweaked the usual settings of D2D and enabled the hardware acceleration? I know its an obvious question but some people forget to do that.
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His processor does not support hardware acceleration.
 
It's your settings and week processor.. blue iris displays the main stream..as suggested You must enable direct to disk..will not work in demo mode.
Your i7 is weaker than a modern I5...an i5 haswell/skylake will consumer about 30 watts under 25-30 percent load.
You dont mention what cameras and what resolution...
 
I currently have one camera, a Hikvision DS-2CD2135F-IS, running at 2048x1536 / 25 fps. Testing on the system in question it's sitting at about 17% on the live view with those settings. Playing around with the settings, if I drop the frame rate to 12 fps my CPU usage to about 11%. That doesn't seem bad too me. Would Blue Iris be adding a lot of overhead on top of that?
 
Chuck Claunch said:
I currently have one camera, a Hikvision DS-2CD2135F-IS, running at 2048x1536 / 25 fps. Testing on the system in question it's sitting at about 17% on the live view with those settings. Playing around with the settings, if I drop the frame rate to 12 fps my CPU usage to about 11%. That doesn't seem bad too me. Would Blue Iris be adding a lot of overhead on top of that?
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Yes, depending on the settings...see above..it will not be the same as viewing via browser. You dont need 25fps...15fps is overkill and perfect.
 
Chuck Claunch said:
what on Earth is Blue Iris doing that's running an i7 920 at 80% 24-7? I know it doesn't take that much CPU to simply save video. After all, the whole point of IP cameras is that they do the heavy lifting (encoding) for you. Is it the motion capture algorithms or something?
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If you want any image processing, such as motion detection.. then it has to analyze HD video streams, and that wont scale on your i7 920 very well without Intel QuickSync Video Support.. I have a i7 920 overclocked to 4GHz here on my Hackintosh workstation.. simply displaying 7 substream feeds at a fairly low bitrate has me at 25% load, and I am not saving the video or analyzing it.. if I change it to 7 main streams (1080p or greater) and I am sitting at a heafty 85-90% load.. just displaying cameras. (smartpss cpu load >700%)

I have a Raspberry Pi with h264 hardware playback support, and it is doing the same friggin thing using merely 12% of its CPU which is a tiny fraction as fast as my i7 920..

Without hardware accleleration, HD video streams will wreck even the fastest CPU's in pretty quick order.. and BlueIris requires a modern Intel Graphics chipset to take advantage of hardware acceleration.
 
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I set it all up and it sits in the 10% range at idle and about 15% while recording, so it's livable for now until I get some more cameras. Seems the Windows Media Center TV recordings don't use much CPU at all so no worries there. I can go without motion capture if need by because I plan to hook into the camera's motion detect output wire with an arduino. @nayer I'd like to see more about the RPi setup you mentioned, sounds cool. I'm slowly building up a home automation system from scratch and enjoy seeing people's setups. Do you have yours documented anywhere?
 
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You guys rock! I've had more questions answered in the last couple of hours of perusing these pages than in MONTHS of playing around on my own.
Just so you understand..
I've gone through 4 (or 5?) different DVR situations, the last a Lorex HD with 16 cameras that stopped accepting video after 2 months.
I had a Core2 duo w/8GB RAM running several old Airlink101 500 cams and using Airlink's software, then started using BI with one (1) added Dahua.
Worked great.
This last week I added 5 more and the core2 just started running 2fps. I installed BI into a Core-i5 3740 I had laying around, and it was a bit better, but as of this morning I was still running 83%-89%, with VERY choppy live video, that would skyrocket to 100% any time a vehicle passed by..
Very frustrating!
Adding streaming out to 2 or three separate PCs didn't make much more than maybe 2% difference. Neither did logging in remotely.
I was afraid I was going to have to spend some $'s on a Core-i7, or a dual or quad CPU pizza box (server). And that's just way too much money (that my wife doesn't know about) for me to spend on it.
But your (and others in other threads) suggestions worked perfectly. Changing to Direct to Disk dropped it down to 45-55%. So I upped my FPS to 30 and it only went to 55-65%.
But the kicker was.. getting out of demo mode. That dropped everything down to a very stable 35-40% with extremely smooth live video feeds.
And now that I've gone in and set the cameras to run their own timestamp, I notice they don't actually do more than 25 fps. So I've also changed the iFrames.
You guys have no idea how happy I am right now.

Again... thank you, thank you, thank you.:livid:
 
Glad the thread helped you! I am probably going to see if my old i7 can trudge through it as I don't care to spend any cash to upgrade it either. Especially when it's a pretty powerful system all things considered (i7 920 w/8GB RAM and 10TB drive space). As I add cameras I'll see how the CPU goes.
 
Chuck Claunch said:
Glad the thread helped you! I am probably going to see if my old i7 can trudge through it as I don't care to spend any cash to upgrade it either. Especially when it's a pretty powerful system all things considered (i7 920 w/8GB RAM and 10TB drive space). As I add cameras I'll see how the CPU goes.
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FYI, that system is not powerful at all. Its is about as powerful as a modern haswell i3, and for blue iris much less so since it doesnt support intel hd/quicksync for hardware acceleration....you are paying your power company instead of paying yourself...have you put your machine on a killawatt meter?
 
The machine is plenty powerful. It simply doesn't have that particular feature that Blue Iris uses. I've had the machine plugged in and running for over eight years and my bills are just fine. The base power draw on it vs a brand new i7 isn't any different. They just cram more cores/features into the newer chips w/the smaller build process. You can't really compare the power draw of an i7 to an i3 of any generation, the two chips were designed with completely different intentions in mind. I have a 5820K w/16GB and SSD as my primary machine, I just don't care to sacrifice it as a glorified video recorder. The question is whether I care to spend $300-500 right now on a new cpu/motherboard/ram. Saving myself $4-5 in electricity per month doesn't really justify it (though that sounds like a compelling argument for the wife :) )
 
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