Does anyone run BI on a very low power box and let the camera's do all the work with ONVIF triggers?

SyconsciousAu

Getting comfortable
Sep 13, 2015
870
826
Like many people here I run an I7 that looks after BI for me, and it is mostly under stressed despite doing all of the motion detection and AI. I've heard a few people mention they use in camera AI to trigger BI via ONVIF, and it got me thinking, how low can I go?
 
For a short while I ran 4x 4K 25fps cameras on an old i3-3220 with H.264 direct-to-disk and direct-to-wire (4K main stream; 720p substream) with no issues, and that was with the i3 handling simple motion detection. I can't remember what CPU utilisation was with that chip as I swapped it out for an i7-3770, but the i7 sat at about 10% utilisation.

If set up like that with no recoding and all motion detection + AI done in-camera, required specs for recording on a modern CPU would be very low - an i3-10110U NUC would likely do the job admirably at 10-15W power draw. The only limitation might be storage.

Playback is a different matter - scrubbing through / exporting 4K footage could be an issue.