BI-based system installed with tips from this site

T

tai4de2

Young grasshopper
Aug 25, 2019
41
15
Near Seattle
Thanks to tips I received from this site, I was able to install a system that I'll describe below. I think this system is on the more involved side, and I learned a lot doing it. Ask me anything.

A total of 13 cameras.
11 exterior:
10x Amcrest IP8M-2496, 4K PoE bullet camera
1x Amcrest IP8M-T2499, 4K PoE turret camera
2 interior:
1x Amcrest IP8M-2496, 4K PoE bullet camera
1x Amcrest IP4M-1051, 4MP Wi-Fi camera

Most cameras are running at 15fps, ~10Mbit H264, VBR 10240Mbps, 1 i-frame per second. The wifi camera is 15fps, 1 i-frame every 5 seconds. Substreams are turned off in all cases.

I used H264 to reduce CPU load on the PC (see below). I can always toss in more storage but H265 is just a PIA to deal with without h/w acceleration.

PC is a repurposed Core-i7 6700 with 16GB RAM.

Blue Iris is using Intel acceleration for all cameras, with "also BVR" turned on, and "limit decoding" enabled. I am using BI's motion detection on only 2 cameras. For the others I use the camera's motion detection.

In this configuration, CPU load is around 7% when the BI GUI isn't running.

I basically created a separate network for the cameras and the PC. I'm using 2x TP-Link T1500G-10MPS, connected to each other and to the PC. All cameras are wired home-run to 2 separate areas in my garage (one per switch). I used outdoor/burial-rated UV-resistant cat6 cable that I bought in bulk (1000' spool).

One thing I am not crazy about is reviewing clips in the BI iPhone app. It's hard to pinpoint a precise time to review, and I can't see any way to have it jump from one motion detection event to another. Am I missing anything?
 
tai4de2 said:
Most cameras are running at 15fps, ~10Mbit H264, VBR 10240Mbps, 1 i-frame per second. The wifi camera is 15fps, 1 i-frame every 5 seconds. Substreams are turned off in all cases.
Click to expand...

IAmATeaf, since tai4de2 cameras are configured for 15fps, then 1 I-frame per second is the same as saying an I-frame interval every 15 frames. So he matched the camera's frame rate to the i-frame interval, with the exception of his wifi camera where the I-frame is every 5 seconds. That means his wifi camera will only generate an I-frame every 75 frames. That's too long an interval especially with a wifi camera that is more likely to drop packets than a camera that is connected by an ethernet cable. I would change the I-frame interval to 15 frames or every 1 second so it matches the cameras frame rate of 15.
 
Actually I've since reconfigured as I play around with various settings.

I have my cameras at 5fps now (with 1 i-frame per second). I am not sure I see any real rationale for more than that. 200ms should be long enough to not miss any motion.

I also changed the Wi-Fi camera to the same configuration.

I also turned on substreams because I was playing with Sighthound, which does *not* do well with 13x 4K camera feeds at 10fps (100% CPU), but uses nearly no CPU at all when given VGA at 10fps. The substreams shouldn't impact Blue Iris at all, presuming I trust them to not overtax the cameras themselves (not sure about that yet).
 
Sub streams shouldn't overload the cameras. As you've noticed, 0.3 megapixel sub streams are much less resource-intensive than the 8.3 megapixel main stream.

A fast i-frame interval (like 1/sec) helps when using "Limit decoding" because it makes the video refresh faster and with less delay, and it allows motion detection to work better. A longer i-frame interval is useful for improving the compression ratio (getting better quality out of a low bit rate), which is very helpful for a wifi camera. I would not worry about packet loss from a wifi camera as a reason to use a short i-frame interval. Wifi has error correction built-in (though I don't know how dependable it is at preventing packet loss), and if that isn't good enough, I believe RTSP usually goes over TCP and that has excellent error correction.
 
tai4de2 said:
One thing I am not crazy about is reviewing clips in the BI iPhone app. It's hard to pinpoint a precise time to review, and I can't see any way to have it jump from one motion detection event to another. Am I missing anything?
Click to expand...
You can jump from alert to alert by hitting the arrows in the playback window (this used to require BVR format and might still be the case).
 
I'm also finding in BI that "limit decoding" and lower frame rates don't interact well with using the built-in motion detector. Basically there is a lag triggering the cameras that cam run 1+ second. That makes sense, since "limit decoding" means that even for motion detection purposes, only i-frames are decoded and sent to the motion detector.

So much to learn to get the most out of this software and a system of IP cameras! But I've been enjoying it.

So now I have all my cameras set up
* WITHOUT "limit decoding"
* 10fps 4K H264 10Mbps
* BI motion detector using object detection
* BI motion detector using regions with various rules
* BI motion detector with make time of 0.0
* BI motion detector without "object must travel xx pixels" (most cameras)
* BI motion detector with rectangles. They don't show up in recorded video (direct-to-disk is enabled) -- but they *do* show up in jpeg, which I like if only for diagnostic purposes.

There are 13 cameras (12x 4K, 1x 4MP). CPU use hovers around 45% without the BI console open, or the iPhone app open etc., CPU temp is ~50deg C, which is within the normal range for an i7-6700.

I'm still evaluating Sighthound. Now that I have BI configured as above, it seems like the only thing Sighthound offers is the AI-based classification (vehicles vs. people vs. animals)... but so far it's not at all clear that this is meaningfully more valuable than what BI provides. And the VMS aspect of Sighthound is not even close to BI.
 
That is a really impressive result. To have ~1037 MP/s on an i7-6700 at only 45% load and only 50°C. I would have expected closer to 65°C, and I've seen i7-6700 systems that don't do half as well. I almost don't believe you have disabled limit decoding on all the cams and have them at 10 FPS.
 
I was looking into getting a Core i9-9900K machine to provide more headroom. My main machine is a 9900K so I will probably try out BI on that and compare results. I’m thinking the 9900 has double the cores and better cache and so could be quite a bit more efficient for my setup.

I’m assuming I can export BI settings from and deactivate the license on the 6700, then activate on the 9900K and import BI settings.
 
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