24 8MP Cameras using Blue Iris (follow up)

[wcrowder]

> You own a store and have a BI system with 8 cameras that can work with either WIFI or LAN,

I don't see how anyone that takes building a camera system seriously can even consider WIFI. I think that says a lot about the OP.

There is a difference between Point-to-point and WIFI... Let's not confuse people...

 

[MartyO]

> of nvr's rebooting, crashing, failing to record etc...every device can have an issue

Yes, I have had several of those in the past...and when they do fail or have software problems, you are pretty much stuck and have to toss it in the trash. The BI platform is much more stable than any NVR I have used, not to mention feature rich and constantly being enhanced. Also, you need to consider that BI is written by a single individual, that is all he does, and it is amazing that he is able to turn out such a feature rich and stable piece of software with such rapid development. Any software update of any kind is subject to have bugs, especially if a new feature is added. I don't think it is realistic to expect a one-man shop to be able to fully regression test every single release...give the guy a break already. He also does not charge for updates, so I don't see how you can say releasing buggy software is his business model...he is not making any money off of updates.

Wonder if surveillance experts(I'm not one) agree with you that BI platform is more stable than NVR, but my instincts tell me NVRs are preferred over BI for reliability.

 

[MartyO]

The topic was nice, the banter is highly annoying

Thanks for the laugh, the banter brought you out of the closet. congrats.

 

[wcrowder]

Wonder if surveillance experts(I'm not one) agree with you that BI platform is more stable than NVR, but my instincts tell me NVRs are preferred over BI for reliability.

Depends on your needs and knowledge. If you "skills" come from cell phones and I-Pads, and you are doing it your self. Grab an NVR. I could stop fiddling with my BI setup and it will run for 3 years and never hiccup... Might have to replace a Hard Drive here and now... Dust the box occasionally. It's in the skill, BI takes just a little of it.

Real NVR's are PC based, and cost more and have less features. The consumer NVR's your talking about have less. I have used a few at work, but they cost >$3,000.00. I had an old analog that I'm replacing with BI at home. It sucked.

"Surveillance Expert" is a different term. To ME a "Surveillance Expert" is expert at monitoring, interpreting and analyzing video with data. It's no longer "Surveillance" it's "Datavaillance" and takes a year or more even to start to grasp it.

Technical experts on installing and maintaining 10-20 camera systems economically is much different then 3,000 camera systems... It's a whole different world. BI is STABLE, has a lot of the features of enterprise systems and is cheap. I like it!!!!

 

[fenderman]

Wonder if surveillance experts(I'm not one) agree with you that BI platform is more stable than NVR, but my instincts tell me NVRs are preferred over BI for reliability.

Why do your "instincts" tell you that? They are wrong. What are you basing this on other than your "instincts" Blue iris is just as stable as any NVR. How is your hikvision NVR holding up?

 

[stonewatch]

IMO the limit of BI is the writing speed with multiple cameras and a high pretrigger frame count, when direct to disk is used. In case of multiple cameras triggered, frames of some cameras get lost long before the I7 processor has reached 100%.

Maybe a good measure of the workload is the total data rate rather than camera count and megapixel. A BI I7 system and an SSD handles 10 cameras and a total data rate of 11MByte quite well. In my case,I am using 2 BI-systems with 17 cameras and never had a crash for 9 months now.

 

[fenderman]

IMO the limit of BI is the writing speed with multiple cameras and a high pretrigger frame count, when direct to disk is used. In case of multiple cameras triggered, frames of some cameras get lost long before the I7 processor has reached 100%.

Maybe a good measure of the workload is the total data rate rather than camera count and megapixel. A BI I7 system and an SSD handles 10 cameras and a total data rate of 11MByte quite well. In my case,I am using 2 BI-systems with 17 cameras and never had a crash for 9 months now.

BI has no write limitation. The limitation is in the disk. If you reach the phisical max of the disk then you either need a faster disk/ssd or split the load between two drives.

 

[stonewatch]

Fenderman, I agree however even when an SSD is used (I am using Intel 530) this is the limiting element.

Have You experimented with parallel SSDs for such a case? Or is the SATA mangement the limit? Or a PCI based storage ? Some kind of cache memory would be helpful.

Instantaneously writing the large amount of pretrigger frames (as in my case necessary for direct to disc recording) seems to be a challenge

 

[fenderman]

Fenderman, I agree however even when an SSD is used (I am using Intel 530) this is the limiting element.

Have You experimented with parallel SSDs for such a case? Or is the SATA mangement the limit? Or a PCI based storage ? Some kind of cache memory would be helpful.

Instantaneously writing the large amount of pretrigger frames (as in my case necessary for direct to disc recording) seems to be a challenge

Something else is wrong...what is your bitrate? how many camera per system? does your mobo support sata 3.0? Have your run a write test with benchmarking software? What I7 model are you using? how close to 100 percent are you getting?

 

[stonewatch]

12MByte, 9 cameras, yes MB:Asus Z97 Gryphon,,not yet, 7 professional, worst case 50% I7-4790K 16GB Ram

There is nothing wrong IMO, just where are the limits of the disk-caches ? Its not the actrual writing but the transfer of cached pretrigger frames to the disk.

 

[fenderman]

12MByte, 9 cameras, yes MB:Asus Z97 Gryphon,,not yet, 7 professional, worst case 50% I7-4790K 16GB Ram

There is nothing wrong IMO, just where are the limits of the disk-caches ? Its not the actrual writing but the transfer of cached pretrigger frames to the disk.

Honestly that bitrate is way overkill...try using 4096, i doubt you will be able to discern any difference.
Something is wrong if you are not able to record the video properly..to test, temporarily offload half the cameras to another drive and see what happens.

 

[stonewatch]

12Mbyte is the total (400kbit to 2,8Mbyte per camera). The system is working fine and has been doing so for over 9 months. You mention offloading the cameras to another recording destination. I have not found this option in BI.
Fenderman what is Your guess of a meaningful limit for BI (Bitrate, cameras) of my system ? My opinion is: 10 cameras rock solid period. More cameras: another PC

 

[fenderman]

12Mbyte is the total (400kbit to 2,8Mbyte per camera). The system is working fine and has been doing so for over 9 months. You mention offloading the cameras to another recording destination. I have not found this option in BI.
Fenderman what is Your guess of a meaningful limit for BI (Bitrate, cameras) of my system ? My opinion is: 10 cameras rock solid period. More cameras: another PC

Blue iris allows for several aux folders. Create them then point half you cameras there. What does windows task manages show for disk usage?
There is not reason why you should have an issue with more than 10 cameras..there are lots of folks here with way more than that.

 

[Razer]

@dobiecomputers - I run several servers and a ton of cameras spread out over multiple locations and I tried out a ton of software before settling on one that worked for my business use case. I ended up with Exacq and I have just shy of 90 servers and honestly need to count cameras again as I know I'm over 1,200 but not sure how far over lol.

Anyway, I run Exacq and one of the main reasons is it is the lightest on hardware that I have found, so you might check it out at some point to see if it would help you out some. As a quick test I checked one of my systems just now, this one has 24 IP cameras total with 22 of them 3mp hiks, 1 5mp ACTI and one analog to digital hik encoder good for 4 analog cameras but only one on there. With every single camera up on screen at once my CPU hits 92-95% use. I am remoted into it via VNC and it is hosting the web client too. The CPU is an i3 3220 and it has 4gb of ram. Normally I have it rotating 4 cameras at a time and it averages maybe 15% CPU usage.

This is not pulling the raw MP your cameras will, but it also is not nearly the machine you have to throw at it either! My highest end machines are only i5's, I have tons of systems out there with i3 and 2gb of ram running 10-15 IP cameras no problems at all. Exacq costs a lot more than BI but I save it on the computer hardware side and it is truly enterprise ready. For my specific needs BI would not work regardless as it is not built for large multi site type of operations. You may not have these needs either, but the efficiency may be a big help to you. Just a thought if you'd not considered them as a solution before.

 

[spyfly81]

@Razer why don't you just run a Hikvision NVR?

 

[MartyO]

@dobiecomputers - I run several servers and a ton of cameras spread out over multiple locations and I tried out a ton of software before settling on one that worked for my business use case. I ended up with Exacq and I have just shy of 90 servers and honestly need to count cameras again as I know I'm over 1,200 but not sure how far over lol.

Anyway, I run Exacq and one of the main reasons is it is the lightest on hardware that I have found, so you might check it out at some point to see if it would help you out some. As a quick test I checked one of my systems just now, this one has 24 IP cameras total with 22 of them 3mp hiks, 1 5mp ACTI and one analog to digital hik encoder good for 4 analog cameras but only one on there. With every single camera up on screen at once my CPU hits 92-95% use. I am remoted into it via VNC and it is hosting the web client too. The CPU is an i3 3220 and it has 4gb of ram. Normally I have it rotating 4 cameras at a time and it averages maybe 15% CPU usage.

This is not pulling the raw MP your cameras will, but it also is not nearly the machine you have to throw at it either! My highest end machines are only i5's, I have tons of systems out there with i3 and 2gb of ram running 10-15 IP cameras no problems at all. Exacq costs a lot more than BI but I save it on the computer hardware side and it is truly enterprise ready. For my specific needs BI would not work regardless as it is not built for large multi site type of operations. You may not have these needs either, but the efficiency may be a big help to you. Just a thought if you'd not considered them as a solution before.

Razor, appreciate your thoughts.

Based on your experience for a single site operation, would you recommend NVR or BI?

also would you tolerate Exaxq if it had many frequent updates like BI does, risking a down system?

 

[Razer]

Depends on my use case I suppose, overall I personally greatly prefer a software and computer based solution over a standalone NVR. Exacq does update a lot, once a quarter at a minimum and some small ones in-between at times. Used to be more like every 45 days but they have slowed down since they were purchased by Tyco. I preferred the faster update cycle but this is fine too - if a system is working fine then don't update it. I usually have 3 systems that are my test systems for new software rollouts. They get it first and if all goes well after a couple of weeks I will roll it out to the others. I just finished updating all my servers to the same version which I do once a year, otherwise who cares what version they are on as long as they are working well? I try to leave them alone.

NVRs are just not enough for my needs, I see them as a record a lot, use little option. They are harder to export video from and generally harder to use and review video on but they are perfect for many uses and users. I see convenience stores and homeowners giving the whole NVR to police as there is no quick easy export option or they don't even know how to. Lots of youtube videos of someone recording the playback screen on a phone to show video lol. Again perfect for a whole lot of uses though so they are great for their purpose.

Even for single site I personally would prefer a software/PC solution. It is just a lot more flexible and if I need other software then I can try it out no problem. One set of hardware can work with virtually any software I choose so I'm not stuck with anything I can't use if I decide to change or try some other cameras out.

 

[MartyO]

Thanks for the response, updating 1-3 times a quarter seems reasonable. My sisterinlaws business has a NVR, when they need to give video to police (they want USB stick) or to save to PC I get asked to come over. Yes it is a little crude, but I usually get a few beers and a meal, so its fun. System is always up and running, no updating.

I personally have two small BI systems, which run all the time, and I like except it has dozens of updates per quarter. The red flag to me was when an update created unprotect login from the internet to system, which was first not believed when reported on this forum, and then was passed off as business as usual, no problem. So I stopped updating. Appreciate folks like you sharing experiences. thanks martyo.

 

[fenderman]

The red flag to me was when an update created unprotect login from the internet to system, which was first not believed when reported on this forum, and then was passed off as business as usual, no problem. So I stopped updating. Appreciate folks like you sharing experiences. thanks martyo.

Its clear that you hate blue iris. So why dont you move on to something else. As far as the admin bug, ITS WAS NOT PASSED AS BUSINESS AS USUAL. It was not reproducible by some because it ONLY affected systems that are run as a service. It was fixed quickly. In order for someone to have exploited the problem you would need 5 things to occur.
1) You had to be running as a service
2) They would need your ip address
3) they would have to be aware of the bug.
4) Failing to secure your connection with a VPN.
5) You had to have applied the update without waiting as is recommended.
The error was patched quickly. You are free to get yourself a hikvision NVR..BTW hikvision's lazy developers downloaded software off an illegitimate site and infected their IOS app with malware. Very secure. There have been other breaches on hikvision NVR's as well. God only knows the security holes in the lower end units that never get firmware updates.
3 times a quarter is once a month. Just a bit more than blue iris updates. Again, UPDATES ARE OPTIONAL. For some reason you cannot get that through your head. I have never seen anyone complain about OPTIONAL updates that offer improvements.
Do not try and pass blue iris off as some unstable insecure software. THAT IS FALSE. Its is solid and secure. You are simply misinformed and being silly about getting too many OPTIONAL updates. I guess it bothers you that you were unable to coax the response you wanted out of razer. Its insane. Now, go order an NVR and call it a day. Lets see how that works out for you.

 

[MartyO]

Fenderman would you please stay out of this, you are much better when you are helping fix problems , not defending an opinion.