I just got myself 8 x Dahua IPC-HDW2231R-ZS from Andy, and now to figure out what machine to run Blue Iris on. I currently run it with a single 1080p cam in a VM with a single vCore from my Dual E5-2680 V2 ESXi box, but I would be wasting a ton of power scaling this up, as there is no quicksync
I have a spare Lenovo M73 tiny with an i5-4570T. Think it will work okay? Is there a formula for passmark/megapixel/fps?
Not to come across as impolite, but read the Blue Iriswiki, and there you can find a link to the Blue Iris Performance Statistics website where you can look up all sorts of configurations to see what others are using and how its working (CPU usage per MP/s).
In your case I typed in your processor, and there are two other members running that processor, with approx 300-700 MP/s and running CPU usage in the 50-80% range. If you ran your 8*2MP cameras at 30 FPS (pretty darn high for security video), you'd be at approx 480 MP/s. So looks like it could work for you (all other negatives of that system aside like no extra space for storage HD and limited space for cooling etc).
I think I have everything configured right, but since I used a trial of Blue Iris I can't verify direct to disk recording. So far with 8 x 2MP Cams set to VBR (Quality 6) and max bitrate of 6144Kb/s, all recording on motion with a 10 second pre-buffer I am seeing around 45% CPU usage, and 15% iGPU usage with the console closed, and 75/20% with it opened
I am running Windows Server 2019 Standard on it, with 8GB of RAM and a spare 60GB Intel SSD. Storage is no concern as I am recording over the network to a NAS.
So far the only big downside with this system is the lack of a second NIC. My CCTV network is on a completely seperate VLAN and I didn't want to have to rely on the Router or switch to do the routing of all the camera traffic. I threw in a spare USB 3.0 Gigabit NIC, but with all 8 cameras loaded up and a constant 30Mb/s load, it would drop packets. Pretty poor! Right now I am just letting it all go through the router, but I plan to offload it to the switch or get a cheap Mini PCI-E Gigabit NIC which should work fine, the wireless NIC can go
Odd that USB NIC should have worked (I ran with one on a LAPTOP for years between the laptop and IP Camera network. Could just be you got a crappy one, defective one, or even a bad network cable could cause you a lot of problems.
I would recommend checking out the Wiki, because you won't want to invest heavily in that little Lenovo, while it's fine for a test drive of Blue Iris you will want to get a proper processor and a real SFF or MT desktop in your future plans. That system will ALWAYS have a crippled "T" version processor, which will always be under powered compared to it's desktop brothers without the T.
At any rate, if Blue Iris is working good for you, it is well worth the investment of $50 or $60 dollars, and you'll get direct-to-disk recording should improve your performance. Also the general guidance is to steer clear of NAS and USB attached storage, I think mostly because it generates fewer problems (not to mention why send all that traffic over the network TWICE). But there are others here that have NAS or even VM and have it working, just stay in lanes you are comfortable troubleshooting on your own, and pay attention to some senior member recommendations in the forums and wiki because they have years of experience avoiding unreliable configurations!
Yeah its pretty old and well used, it also could be that the driver support in Windows Server is not really up to par
I already own a licence, but I currently have it running in a VM, which would be horrible for 8 cameras. I have a box serving other purposes with a Xeon E3-1245 v5 which would be perfect for Blue Iris once I move some things around, I plan on putting it in a short depth Supermicro 1u chassis
NAS storage should be no issue, I suspect the people having problems with it have some config issues, or just crappy hardware. I would throw it on some dirt cheap local storage, but I have the footage being synced in real time to my colo box (So even if someone steals the NVR and all the storage, I still have the footage) and I am using the Synology CloudSync software, which can't be run on anything other than Synology DSM. I havn't yet found any sync software that actually works as well
Next project is setting up a local NTP and SMTP servers so I don't have to mess around with the time on all the cameras, and so I can try out email notifications on the Dahua cams without giving them internet access
