effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time?

[piconut]

I'm trying to understand how the stream from an IP camera (ie Hikvision) is used or overused if more than one software application tries to access the stream for recording. Hypothetically, let's say I have Blue Iris running on a dedicated PC and then I set up another identical PC with Blue Iris and in both cases, they both are setup to record a stream from the same camera from the same time. What issues, if any, would this cause? Like would each instance of Blue Iris only get half the frame rate, or would one take priority over the other?

The reason I'm trying to figure this out is that I was playing around with the Hikvision IVMS software for the first time last night while my Blue Iris dedicated PC was doing it's thing and recording streams from several cameras and it occurred to me that running the IVMS software might cause the stream to BI to be interrupted or drop frames. I also have another piece of software called IP Timelapse from Mike at Sebectec Software that is designed to create timelapse movies from IP cameras. If I use that on a camera that is also being monitored in BI, will that cause an issue (IP Timelapse uses the RTSP stream too, which is what I think the IVMS and BI do, but I'm not positive about this). Would it be possible to use BI, IVMS and IP Timelapse all on the same camera(s) at the same time without causing any issues? If it makes any difference, each of the software programs would be running on their own dedicated PC.

Thanks in advance for your help and guidance!

 

[bp2008]

Re: effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time

I'm not sure how many streams a Hikvision camera is capable of hosting simultaneously. But I bet as long as your network is up to snuff then it should be fine. Just make sure you aren't overloading any 100 Mbps LAN links with all the accumulated data.

 

[piconut]

Re: effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time

OK, so I guess that means that each application that attaches to a camera is given a separate stream. I wasn't sure if the camera just send out one stream and multiple applications can somehow view (or attach to) that one stream, or if as you implied, that a unique stream is "sent out" from the camera to each application when requested. So I do know that the Hikvision's have a main stream and a sub-stream. Are those the kind of streams you're talking about, or are you saying that several different applications can each get their own main stream?

Thank you for your help. Obviously I'm not a networking specialist!

 

[bp2008]

Re: effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time

Each application that connects to the camera is given a copy of the requested stream. It works a lot like a web server in this way. Multiple clients can request the same resource at the same time and their actions will not interfere with each other unless the web server is overloaded.

So if you have Blue Iris, iVMS, and IP Timelapse all connecting to the same camera using the main stream URL, then all 3 will get copies of the main stream. Since IP cameras have relatively weak embedded computers, there may be a limit to the number of simultaneous connections they can handle. Each connection uses a bit of CPU and memory so it is likely that 20 connections to one camera would not be possible but 3 would be fine.

 

[piconut]

Re: effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time

OK, cool, that explains it very clearly.

So I have one related question. Does your UI2 and/or the Blue Iris web viewer actually get one of the copies of the stream too (so it would be 4 copies of the stream in my example) or does Blue Iris take the stream it gets from the camera and somehow (from my perspective...black box magic) create a new stream to view on the web so that I'm still only using 3 copies of the stream from the camera's perspective?

 

[fenderman]

Re: effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time

Like bp says, 3 streams should be fine..also consider that you can send streams from your BI machine to another BI machine or to IPtimelapse..this will make the other machines dependent on the primary BI machine and may increase cpu use on the host machine...
Another thing to explore is using multicast...I have never used it...but it should allow you to stream to many devices at once...

 

[bp2008]

Re: effects of using multiple apps to record from the same camera(s) at the same time

I think most cameras do not support multicast.

Anyway, Blue Iris will only pull one stream from each camera for all its functions. You can even add the same camera to Blue Iris twice and assuming you used exactly the same URL both times it will only pull one stream to feed both "cameras".