Andy's NVR vs Blue Iris?

[bigredfish]

The fewer fps the less it matters. You wont miss but maybe one frame.

But yes I understand the difference, a single continuous file would make that one frame easier to single step to.

I can honestly say with recording wildlife as well as faces, I havent missed anything worth being concerned about. In fact I've never heard of the issue before you brought it up.

 

[bigredfish]

Yeah I can open live view of multiple cameras, but what about playback of previous events?

I can only find solo cam of recorded playback?

When do you ever do this by the way?

I can do it on the NVR as well as SmartPSS and synched. But I can’t recall the last time I ever felt the need, especially on mobile.

DMSS allows 4 on playback. But like most I rarely look at more than one camera at a time in playback in Playback

 

[tigerwillow1]

What I think of your wildlife is slow, geblunk, geblunk, at least before they're ready to chomp down on somebody Even the little ducks didn't exactly race out of their house. I wonder if any of them made it, talk about diving into the pit full of gators. I occasionally get a pretty good one frame wonder.

 

[Flintstone61]

Hi

I have been using blue iris for a number of years. I have a nas which is where I save my videos. I am running close to 64 cameras - mainly because I can't seem to stop buying cameras.

I do get a ton of false alerts in Blueiris and am comfortable with it overall but was curious about what the pros/cons would be upgrading to Andy's NVR?

Would I need a 64 channel one? Do the empire tech ai cameras work better with this NVR vs Blue?

Thanks
Rich

You can have both.
If for nothing else than learning and comparing.
You can tinker around with settings and learn how to best operate an NVR and learn about playing back motion events, etc....
Apps for smart phones etc....
I run BI with an Amcrest 4116 NVR. Cams are powered by a Cisco small business switch which reduces latency(lag) vs. plugged into the NVR directly.
My Sister in law does not do English well, Much less a Camera app. So the Amcrest View Pro App makes her happy while she sits at at her work bench at work and can peek around at the cams. Notifications were excessive so I turned those off for her.
If we have a real need to find an event, Blue Iris is the most convenient for me. I abhor surfing thru the NVR menu timelines. It makes me want to choke the living shit out of the software "designer".

 

[bigredfish]

What I think of your wildlife is slow, geblunk, geblunk, at least before they're ready to chomp down on somebody Even the little ducks didn't exactly race out of their house. I wonder if any of them made it, talk about diving into the pit full of gators. I occasionally get a pretty good one frame wonder.

View attachment 223443

LOL Good shot!

We have some faster critters ...

 

[bigredfish]

You can have both.
If for nothing else than learning and comparing.
You can tinker around with settings and learn how to best operate an NVR and learn about playing back motion events, etc....
Apps for smart phones etc....
I run BI with an Amcrest 4116 NVR. Cams are powered by a Cisco small business switch which reduces latency(lag) vs. plugged into the NVR directly.
My Sister in law does not do English well, Much less a Camera app. So the Amcrest View Pro App makes her happy while she sits at at her work bench at work and can peek around at the cams. Notifications were excessive so I turned those off for her.
If we have a real need to find an event, Blue Iris is the most convenient for me. I abhor surfing thru the NVR menu timelines. It makes me want to choke the living shit out of the software "designer".

I think the newer NVRs are even better, but I show in video 4 ways to search and download clips in seconds using the NVR or SmartPSS. It’s easier once you know how.

Post #49

Post in thread 'Blue Iris Dahua NVR'

May 8, 2025

The beauty of downloading and reviewing footage using a Dahua NVR is the number of ways you can do it, all very easy once you know how

In addition to using SmartPSS Lite (2 option methods shown in video) ,
You can also use the NVR timeline interface,(video)
Or the NVR AI Search interface (video)

*Oh yeah. And you can do the same on your phone using the DMSS app

Of course with all of these you can define the day, hours, human/vehicle, or show only IVS or Motion events on the timeline if you so choose

It’s faster and easier

View attachment Recording 2025-05-08 162653.mp4

View attachment Recording 2024-10-30 220556.mp4

View attachment Screen Recording 2024-10-30 222829.mp4

• bigredfish

 

[wittaj]

When do you ever do this by the way?

I can do it on the NVR as well as SmartPSS and synched. But I can’t recall the last time I ever felt the need, especially on mobile.

DMSS allows 4 on playback. But like most I rarely look at more than one camera at a time in playback in Playback

View attachment 223459

I consider playing back all the cams at once no different than watching all of them live at once.

I have lots of pinch point cameras, so I find it nice to just click on one of those and be able to go forward/backwards on all the cameras at once to see where did that person come from, where did they go, etc.

As an example, we had someone walk thru here at 4am that didn't live here.

My LPR camera is only set to record vehicles, not people, but the S3 version can still capture people (albeit it dark).

By selecting the pinch point camera trigger and seeing all the cameras at once, I was able to scroll back and forward and see on the LPR cams that this person tried the doors as they walked by.

And it is well known that the T180 cam sucks at IVS triggers outside of the middle of the frame and struggles at night, so this aids in seeing the overview cam and the travel of people and cars I am reviewing without having to go to just that camera and its timeline and remember what time did I need to scroll to.

Without that feature, I would then have to say ok they walked by the pinchpoint camera at 4:01:35 on this camera and then have to go to the 24/7 recorded LPR video and scroll to around that time to find the person on the recorded video and then go to the 180 camera and do the same thing to then find the coming/going.

It simply is a nice tool in scrolling thru the recorded video of events.

 

[bigredfish]

You have a time. Not like you have to scrub hours of video.

Ok, well I can get by with 4 cameras playback simultaneous. If I see that the target went by those 4 and I need to check the other 4 it just takes 10 seconds to switch the view, on mobile phone.

Remember like most, if I’m that interested in an event I’m doing that on my desktop and using SmartPSS or the NVR where I can see/play ALL cameras simultaneously, synched, anyway.

But in close to 12 years I’ve never had the need to do that

Same as the digital zoom thing. We’re talking not about things that can’t be done via NVR, we’re talking about how many seconds it takes to do them.

I mean if we’re gonna go there, I can switch a camera live video to playback in less than one second on the new version of DMSS.

Big PLAYBACK button at bottom, its instantaneous

 

[steve1225]

Heh..
another religious war I have to buy popcorn haha

First important note - comparing what Ubiquity does with its Unifi Protect NVR platform - the Dahua / HIK / Blue Iris solutions & platforms - all look like they came from the XX century.

Sorry - but in terms of appearance (UI), functionality and ease of use (UX), unfortunately, all of them have fallen by the wayside quite a long time ago...

I can't comment on the development of BI (do new versions make any revolutions in UI and UX?). However, I would like to point out that Dahua has recently made two changes:

- DMSS upgraded to 2.0 has gained several functions:

One is high density multi-view from all or selected devices. It works brilliantly..

The second is that in the view from the selected channel we have a view and classic timeline (the oldest solution), and a view of events as a list with thumbnails from the camera/NVR with a filter for event type and separate a view of messages (events) from the cloud that were sent to it by the device...

It's not perfect, but it gives you a lot of possibilities to quickly search for what interests you from the phone remotely... Of course require proper planing how to use different AI event types on camera to record/mark what functionality / event types..

third one - the P2P (cloud?) connection is working now... after many years of non stop problems, they fixed that...

- NVR has extensive search options for individual AI event types. WizMind-S/X cameras allow you to simultaneously do both IVS events (divided into intrusions and trip wire, concerning only selected by You fragments of the recorded view) and Video Meta Data divided into people and vehicles.

Amazing possibilities of dividing what, where and how will be marked / recorded, so that you can later search for something depending on your needs.

BI as I understands it don't recognize / understands more advanced AI event types... there is no use for anything more advanced that IVS..

 

[tigerwillow1]

another religious war I have to buy popcorn haha

Doesn't have to be if the contributors stay objective. The platforms are different, and at least with BI and NVR, neither one does every single thing better than the other. This makes one better for some people and the other better for other people, based on their needs and preferences. The opening post asked for comparative pros/cons, and a lot of them have been listed. My opinion is that for some users BI is better and for others NVR is better, then there are the greedy ones like me who aren't willing to give up anything and use both.

comparing what Ubiquity does with its Unifi Protect NVR platform - the Dahua / HIK / Blue Iris solutions & platforms - all look like they came from the XX century.

Hearing this makes me fear spending even more money down the road.

 

[tigerwillow1]

The old dog learns another BI trick. It seemed very logical to me that if my UI3 display was 1080p, then a data rate higher than 1080p would be a waste. Wrong! Each faster speed shows an image detail improvement, even going from 2160 to 4320. However, from poking around, the very best detailed image is with using JPEG HD. Maybe there's some unintended consequences lurking here, but this is what I'll try going forward. Today's snips are lower quality than yesterday's when the lighting was ideal. I got the SmartPSS and UI3 images side by side on the screen, so each of these snapshots is both at exactly the same time. First, here's SmartPSS vs. UI3@4320, with SmartPSS on the left.


The SmartPSS image is obviously better with the details.
Here's the same comparison with UI3 using JPEG HD:


I like the contrast better in the SmartPSS image, but my conclusion is that the details are overall equal. This knocks off one of my major BI/UI3 minuses.

This is a great example of the IMO needless complexity of BI. There are 15 streaming profiles to chose from, each one can have its settings tweaked, and changes can also be made to the streaming profiles on the BI host machine. SmartPSS offers only Mainstream and Substream. Simple, intuitive, and as far as I have seen works just as well as any of the BI/UI3 profiles, without possibly spending hours trying to figure them out.

I can see that many of BI complaints can be attributed to user error. The complexity is just inviting them.

 

[bigredfish]

What camera is that again?

 

[tigerwillow1]

It's a 5842-Z S2. It's pretty much a junk camera for me because it won't detect animals, but occasionally I find a temporary use where the higher resolution is handy. Right now it's mounted to a 2x4 sticking out of a bucket filled with rocks, and its wire runs through the tall grass.