Hello from northern California - 42 cameras running Blue Iris

DarrenD

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Greetings. I've been using the forum for about 6 months. I bought Blue Iris at that time and we have everything working pretty well now. Thank you to the forum and members, this place is a valuable resource and Blue Iris is a very good product at a great price.

I'm the IT person at a food manufacturing plant near the SF bay area. When I started we had 16 cameras on ExacqVision's software NVR. Now we have 42 cameras. All of them are on Blue Iris. We kept the ExacqVision server going. Its license expired years ago but it still works and staff is used to it. We keep the 16 most staff-popular cameras on it. We also have an ACTi NVR 3 software server that comes with 16 free licenses. Mostly shop cameras on that one. Some staff uses Blue Iris since we can see all of our cameras on one screen. Eventually everyone will use it.

I originally planned to move all cameras off of ExacqVision and the ACTi NVR server and just use Blue Iris. However, I found that having three different NVRs comes in handy, especially when there is a request from staff to view previous recordings. It increases the chances of capturing important events and alerts for the cameras that are on multiple NVRs.

Anyway here's our setup:

Blue Iris workstation
Dell OptiPlex 7020
Intel i5-4570 CPU 3.20 GHZ
8 GB RAM
C Drive: 450 GB (OS, Blue Iris database)
D Drive: 2.72 TB (dedicated for clip storage. New, Stored and Alerts)
Windows 7 64 bit

42 TOTAL IP cameras. All of them are dome style.
21 HikVision DS-2CD2142FWD-I
12 ACTi ACM-3511
11 ACTi E53
1 ACTi E73

The three software NVRs we are using:

ExaqcVision 6 (16 licenses paid)
ACTi NVR 3 (16 licenses free)
BlueIris 4.6.4.3 (64 licenses paid)

All three of these computers have dual network cards. Our camera LAN is 192.168.x.x and our Office LAN is 10.140.x.x. This way the camera traffic does not affect our office traffic.

We have a Dell Switch N3048P that provides power to about half the cameras that are close to the MDT. We also have a couple of cheap 8 port PoE switches and a few PoE injectors for the cameras that are further away.

  • All cameras but two are set to 1280x720 resolution. the other two are 1920x1080
  • All frame rates are 10 FPS or less. I set this on each individual camera, in the Blue Iris general options, and I have set the limit live preview rate to 10 fps.
  • All cameras are direct to disc recording
  • Video format Blue Iris DVR
  • Encoder quality set to 60%
  • Preset - SuperFast
  • Intel Hardware Acceleration - Yes (H.264)
  • Audio disabled for all cameras
  • Webcast JPEG quality - 85%
  • Rate Control Max Bitrate - 4096 kbps
  • Text overlays - yes but done on each camera, not on Blue Iris.
  • Blue Iris is running as a service
CPU is running consistently at about 40%. Low spikes 30%, high spikes 50%. One thing of note - setting camera resolution down to 1280x720 made quite a difference. Originally I had them all at 1920x1080 but it was causing high CPU usage.
 

Q™

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Welcome @DarrenD!

I purchased an ACTi E33 5MP camera several years ago; boy does that camera S U C K. How bad does it suck? It sucks so bad the ACTi E33 is sitting on a shelf...but I'm still running a 1MP Vivotek FD8136.
 

DarrenD

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Yeah, the ACTis we have suck. They were here when I started. I really like the HikVisions we recently bought. Better quality at a lower cost. When I eventually setup a cam system for home I will avoid ACTi like the plague.
 
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