Best way to optimize Camera Feeds to avoid bandwidth limits and cap

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All.

Constant lurker here, I am travelling back to old place this week to install the following:
  • Currently have 1.3MP Amcrest mounted indoors, will move to outdoors garage
  • Bought IPC-HDBW4231F-E2-M (2MP starlight PoE 3.6mm) dual-dome, adding to cover small back and side yards, guessing this will essentially count as two streams.
  • Bought IPC-HDW4231EM-ASE (2MP starlight PoE 3.6mm) eyeball to cover rear full lot
  • Bought IPC-HDW2531R-ZS (5MP PoE varifocal) to cover front yard which is well lit

Firstly, let me say buying from Andy via Paypal was smooth transaction, even though I hastily provided wrong ship to address in Paypal, and DHL was awesome and rerouted the packages from Colorado to Illinois no-charge while they were still flowing through their transportation network. Haven't seen them yet but know they arrived.

Secondly, where I am putting them has Comcrap internet 25/5. The streams are going to new home BI server via always-on VPN from remote ASUS router. The new internet connection does not have a cap as far as I've found, only the old place.

I guess I hadn't added up all the bandwidth requirements, because I figured I'd see it soon after I install everything and bp2008 has guided away from internet bandwidth calculators, but now I'm wondering if I am headed for trouble with regard to the following limitations:

  • Assume I have a hard limit of 5 Mbps upload that is reasonably consistent, but honestly 3 Mbps is really the number that gets me to the 1TB cap.
  • a hard limit of 1024 GB (1TB) per month, after which I will pay $10 per 50GB up to max $200
Eyeballing what my Amcrest is currently using (40KB/s @ 2FPS, approx 3.45GB/day, 120GB/month) I'm suspecting adding all these cameras are going to push me over at least the monthly cap.

Am I sunk before I begin? Will I be stuck with 1 FPS or crappy quality compression?
 
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bp2008

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What is the monthly bandwidth limit? You said 1024 terabits (128 terabytes) but I don't believe you.

These are some things that improve image quality when you can't raise the bit rate:
  • Lower frame rate
  • H.265 should be better than H.264
  • Higher i-frame interval (keep in mind this will affect seeking efficiency, motion-triggered recording startup delay, etc)
  • "Smart Codec" or other vendor-specific encoding extensions ... which usually are not compatible with Blue Iris.
  • Use a lower resolution
  • Use lower quality audio or no audio. AAC encoding is a much better choice than most other common audio codecs.
  • Use the "region of interest" feature, if available, to encode the most important part of the video frame in higher quality. Parts of the frame outside the region of interest will be lower quality.
If I needed to store video offsite and had limited bandwidth to achieve it, I would simply record on motion detection and have Blue Iris automatically back up the clips via FTP, or save the clips into a Dropbox folder or something. This does have the downside of being somewhat delayed, like if someone walks up to your house and axes the internet line before going inside and stealing your server, then you probably won't have video of it. For this reason it could be wise to have BI cut clips at 15 or 30 or 60 seconds or whatever, thereby helping to ensure that clips get uploaded with less delay.
 
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Fixed this bp2008, limit is 1 TB, or 1024 GB per month. Too many Google conversions trying to figure this out, got my 1TB and 1024GB crisscrossed and then typed Terabits like a noob.

If push comes to shove might be time for an onsite $100 BI computer chained to the wall, maybe with some combination of substream recorded over VPN or motion detection max-rez photos in case something goes down (house burns down, computer gets stolen) I have at least something recorded remotely.

I already actively monitor local BI webserver at least 8 hours per day, most days of the week (aka I just have it up on another monitor). Maybe an IFRAME to show both or two windows or something.
 
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H.265 turned out to be a much bigger impact than I expected, helping me out on the bandwidth issue as it dropped noticeably when I switched the new cameras from H.264 to H.265, currently I have streaming
  • 1 - 5MP H.265, 2:FPS, Quality:Best
  • 1 - 2MP H.265, 2:FPS, Quality:Best
  • 1 - 1.3MP H.264H, 2:FPS, Quality:Best
and bandwidth is averaging about 220-240KBps, or ~620GB/mo slightly over half my data cap rate. Guess I'll wait to see if I get any notices about my abnormal residential usage patterns.

Didn't get around to permanently hooking up the dual-dome, just ran out of time, but had them all streaming at one time (if I remember correctly 5FPS was over 650KBps). I settled on 2 FPS instead of 5 FPS to avoid exceeding the 1TB cap (excess usage rate is $10/50GB or additional $50 flat fee to eliminate the cap).

Will probably have to wait until I can get 10/10 or such fiber installed at the old house (it's cheaper per month and removes the 1TB data cap, but had to wait 3 years to get it at that address) which should also allow me to up the frame rates. I did try messing with the resolution, but just seems a crime to cripple the 2MP or 5MP cameras for the sake of bandwidth, although I did see some impact fiddling with the iframe setting. For now I am using FPS:2, I-Frame:4 configuration.

Thanks for the guidance @bp2008 !
 
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