There's a lot of
BlueIris hard sell going on here, so let me throw in my 2 cents as a recent (<2 months) adopter. I have tried cheap China NVR's, ISpyConnect, standalone cameras with built-in motion detection functionality, Synology NVR Surveillance Station, and even some commercial grade software (cant remember the name).
The SINGLE compelling reason for my decision to buy BlueIris was the motion detection. Everything else I have ever tried is basically unusable when it comes to motion detection, I was always getting false positive alerts e.g.
- The sun came out
- The wind blew
- It rained
- The camera IR lights turned on/off
- The camera mount shook
- A cloud cast a shadow
- a mosquito farted (ok that one was an exaggeration)
And once you have tweaked the settings with low enough sensitivity to try to eliminate the false positives, you start missing
real events. The bane of any NVR software for me is needing to review hundreds of clips of total junk, and finally realizing that even if the second coming of christ happened in your driveway and was captured on camera, you probably would miss it in the thousands of "
a leaf moved" alerts.
In contrast, of 3 cameras currently active, my most recent alert was of a Wild Boar walking across the driveway, My last false positives were from a torrential downpour 2 days ago.
If you are tech savvy, have a low budget, and you have indoor only cameras with perfectly controlled lighting, then you might not even
need any addition software. Most cameras today have built in motion detection, and can send clips by FTP/Email. Most cameras today have inbuilt web servers and follow Onvif standards, so you can use a myriad of free or nearly free PC & Mobile Apps (
Onvif device manager for PC, Onvifer for Android, etc.) to view your camera.
But I have an outdoor location, variable lighting, and I want to see a good level of genuine alerts with few false positives. My conclusion was that BlueIris gave me that. Good Luck!
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