Hardware Weight for Blue Iris

eangulus

eangulus

Getting the hang of it
May 19, 2015
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6
Just wondering what aspects of hardware are more important than others for configuring a BI Box?

I have run several BI Systems and roughly know what works and what doesn't, but I am looking for a bit more refined information.

eg. With CPU, what order of importance is the features: Mhz, Cores, Threads, Cache, GPU with what aspect of the build such as Number of cams, MP/s resolution etc.

I am just tired of building systems with the Hope it will work. I either need to spend more money on upgrading an aspect of the box or I have to overbuild. I don't expect hard and fast rules, but a rough guide. For example, my rule of thumb for RAM is Half the Number of cameras or more. eg, 16 Cameras = 8+Gb RAM.

Trying to do a similar thing for CPU's.
 
I'd be interested in this too, as it looks like I may get a PC (or maybe i5/i7 NUC) dedicated for this, but like yourself I don't wish to have a system that's either too under or over whelming.
 
eangulus said:
Just wondering what aspects of hardware are more important than others for configuring a BI Box?

I have run several BI Systems and roughly know what works and what doesn't, but I am looking for a bit more refined information.

eg. With CPU, what order of importance is the features: Mhz, Cores, Threads, Cache, GPU with what aspect of the build such as Number of cams, MP/s resolution etc.

I am just tired of building systems with the Hope it will work. I either need to spend more money on upgrading an aspect of the box or I have to overbuild. I don't expect hard and fast rules, but a rough guide. For example, my rule of thumb for RAM is Half the Number of cameras or more. eg, 16 Cameras = 8+Gb RAM.

Trying to do a similar thing for CPU's.
Click to expand...

HI @eangulus

As I understand it, the most critical is a CPU which supports certain operations in the processor for better H.264 and H.265 encode and decode as well as other image and compute optimizations

Thus the first thing you look for the right processor.... there is a thread on hardware for blue iris see the wiki
IPCamTalk WiKi | IP Cam Talk
 
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Internal gpu, cores, mhz and so on...

In my view this would require testing to marry each platform to each set of BI configs. If you use intel cpus the latest generations have way better quick sync performance than older gen 2 or 3. But on the other hands BI loves cores and muti threading. I have tested running 5 cameras on a i3 2120 and nuc running 4310u and the 2120 did better. I7 3770 runs rings around anything you throw at it. I have found a 3450 to be the sweet spot for me. Have not tested 4gen yet. However my BI settings are different to yours or to somebody else. It will be a big spreadsheet. To that cost also plays another role. Ddr4 is too expensive yet (gens 6,7,8)
 
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Here, you can find real, unbiased data on a wide variety of BI systems running all kinds of configurations (click any table row to see full details of a particular system). Blue Iris Update Helper

Blue Iris is a complex beast so you need to take the data with a grain of salt sometimes, but with the popular CPU models particularly, you should be able to get a good idea of the capabilities.
 
One thing to note in the data. My system reports 24 cameras. I have only 12 physical cameras that are all cloned. This would not equal the same load as a system of 24 cameras. I wonder if the data collection could check for cloned cameras by comparing IPs?
 
anijet said:
One thing to note in the data. My system reports 24 cameras. I have only 12 physical cameras that are all cloned. This would not equal the same load as a system of 24 cameras. I wonder if the data collection could check for cloned cameras by comparing IPs?
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm sure it would be possible. I'd probably implement it wrong though since there isn't simply a flag in the registry saying "this camera is a duplicate" that I know of.

Another complexity is that the only way I could find to get an accurate Frames Per Second record is to ask BI's web server. But this isn't 100% reliable either because some configurations might not expose all cameras to the web server, or the web server might be disabled, etc. In that case the FPS value comes from the registry where the closest thing is the value of the "Max. Rate" setting, which is often a lot higher than the camera really is streaming.

So there are a few things which can cause misleading numbers in the data.
 
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