Blue Iris on an iMac running Windows 10 via Bootcamp

[danioj]

Hello All,

First time poster, long time reader. As I plan to move into my new home I am planning on investing heavily in home automation and security. Obviously, one of those items is security cameras. I have landed on using BlueIris as my NVR (no brainer really) and am very pleased to see that registering with this forum actually scores me a discount on that future purchase.

With respect to the machine I will run it on, I have a spare iMAC that I no longer use:

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 4570
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1 GB

I intend to have 8 IP Cams running SD 24x7 recording with motion detection upping the recording to 4k.

I would like to use this spare machine as my dedicated BlueIris machine. Based on what I have read I feel the i5 has the grunt (as well as the quick sync capability), there is enough memory. My plan is to upgrade my OS drive to an SSD and replace the current 3.5 inch drive with a WD Purple. I realise that BlueIris doesn't run on OSX, but I have the option of installing Windows 10 (via Bootcamp) which would mean Windows 10 would not be virtualised and running bare metal from the SSD with the 3.5 for data.

A quick search of the forum doesn't seem to show much in relation to this topic. Does anyone have any experience with this? Would certainly mean that I don't have to shell out for more hardware.

Thanks

Daniel

 

[curmudgeon]

It will definitely work. However, you should know that driver support from Apple may be an issue. For example, a couple years back, one version of Win10 wouldn't run under bootcamp for nearly a year due to driver issues and finger-pointing between Microsoft and Apple. Once Apple updated the drivers, then you could update to the latest version of Win10. Since Win10 has a nasty habit of updating itself unless you go thru some real hassle, you could find yourself with a non-functioning system one day without warning. And then be forced to troubleshoot it for a day or two. As a Mac user, I'm sure troubleshooting Windows issues must be among your favorite activities

I ran BI successfully via Bootcamp for a couple years. Once I decided to upgrade cameras, I switched over to a Windows machine with a newer processor. Your iMac has an older processor, which will work, but might not be enough as you add cameras.

Try it, you have nothing to lose, as you can just export your BlueIris config to a new machine.

Also, the latest Win10 now has the "Windows Subsystem for Linux 2" so you can install your favorite flavor of Linux directly inside Windows; it runs directly on the Hyper-V hypervisor, so you can run Ubuntu (or CentOS, or whatever) natively, simultaneously, and use bash command line (and scripts) instead of Powershell and all that other nonsense.