Intel i5 4590 + 8Gb RAM; will it be able to swing it?

Folks here like Dahua and don't like the performance of Reolink, and provided examples and reasoning for both. Maybe the dislike of Reolink is strong, but the reasoning is sound.

Pity the OP didn't show up wanting to learn, instead wanting to fight.

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Seems like every week or two.... A new user logs in, and baits us with a Scenario about using Reolinks. Fuck it. Let em use whatever the hell they want. Short answer the Dell will work for BI. As for Cam's... well he needs to experience that for himself.
Heres my crappy 2mp camera ....5421 LP capture.....:) with a crappy 5442 2.8mm overview cam...
 

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1080p cams won't cut it, I know this for a fact;
A resolution that low will render license plates mostly unreadable.
It's actually the reason why I'm looking to upgrade to higher resolution ones.

I thought Reolink looked pretty good, and seems to be popular.
But I guess if I want to use Blue Iris, they are off the table..

Amcrest, another commonly recommended brand, seems to be US based,
and is difficult to get here without paying a heap of shipping/customs.

Hikvision seems to be rather pricey once you get to the better ones.

I honestly don't know what brand to get anymore.
Does Reolink work on other surveillance software?

Dude, most of us use 1080p cams for plates. Most businesses still use analog. 4MP is overkill for plates.

You are looking at the wrong camera for the purpose. A fixed 2.8mm camera will not read a plate from 40 feet away regardless of the MP. Most will not be able to do with a moving car from 10 feet away.

Regarding a camera for plates (LPR) - keep in mind that this is a camera dedicated to plates and not an overview camera also. It is as much an art as it is a science. You will need two cameras. For LPR we need to optically zoom in tight to make the plate as large as possible. For most of us, all you see is the not much more than a vehicle in the entire frame. Now maybe in the right location during the day it might be able to see some other things, but not at night.

At night, we have to run a very fast shutter speed (1/2,000) and in B/W with IR and the image will be black. All you will see are head/tail lights and the plate. Some people can get away with color if they have enough street lights, but most of us cannot. Here is a representative sample of plates I get at night of vehicles traveling about 45MPH that is 175 feet away from my camera with, wait for it, a 2MP camera. Let's see a Reolink read a plate from 175 feet away.


1607010182386.png



This is an example from Reolink's marketing videos - do you see a person in this picture...yes, there is a person in this picture. This is why you cannot buy any system that you cannot change the shutter speed or control any other parameter. Could this provide anything useful for the police? Would this protect your showroom? The still picture looks great though except for the person and the blur of the vehicle... Will give you a hint - the person is in between the two columns:


1613251115189.png


Bad Boys
Bad Boys
Watcha gonna do
Watcha gonna do
When the camera can't see you
 
Well, if you know better than the combined experience of the many here, go ahead and buy the Reolink. I'm sure you'll have exactly what you want and what you pay for. End of discussion.
"Go ahead and buy Reolink, Go ahead and buy Reolink, You know better, youll cry."
Seriously? That's your best rebuttal when I dare say the Dahua camera you recommend looks pixelly and not worth 230 dollars?
"Because I say so" is not a good incentive for me to go blow 230 bucks on something, so ill just ignore your "advice".

Folks here like Dahua and don't like the performance of Reolink, and provided examples and reasoning for both. Maybe the dislike of Reolink is strong, but the reasoning is sound.

Pity the OP didn't show up wanting to learn, instead wanting to fight.
Sure, Dahua good, Reolink bad, I get it, I won't buy Reolinks, ok?
I just saw Reolink getting raving reviews on youtube and thought they were OK. So sue me for coming here thinking that.
And I still haven't seen any reasoning on why that awful 2MP Dahua is apparently so great.
The sample videos of it are not very convincing, as I couldn't read all but one license plate,
and that one was with it zoomed in on 2 square foot of asphalt to make it fill the screen.

And let me make one thing clear; I am not looking for a fight, I am merely defending myself from all the belittlement being thrown at me.
I didn't even ask about cameras, I just wanted to know if the hardware I chose could chug Blue Iris and about 32MP worth of videofeed.
The first post warned me about Reolinks and that should have and could have been it. But some of you chose to have a go at me for it.
What do you all want from me? "Sorry I looked at some reviews and pulled a conclusion that ended up not pleasing to you" ?

I guess I should have used better terminology as I didnt know there were LPR cameras until I came here,
all I wanted is an overview camera good enough to read a plate thats about 30ft away from it.
And big surprise, I found a youtube video of somebody specifically testing this on a few reolink cameras.
Plate was still readable 50ft away, and still readable with him running past 35ft away.
In outdoors pitch black it was less than stellar, but my storefront has a big streetlight right out front of it.

Heres the video in question, feel free to tear it apart, it no longer matters anyway,
I came in thinking Reolinks were ok, and that's all people seem to want to fixate on now.
 
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In my first post I told you what was needed to make the pc work well with bi.

The people here are trying to save you money with the hard earned knowledge that they have acquired over time.

Reolink as well as many other equipment manufacturers pay reviewers for good reviews. Nobody here makes money from reviews.

Test do not guess
Do it right the first time will save you money
First read study plan... Then read study plan again.
 
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Most of us do not use actual LPR cameras to read plates. Almost any good quality camera that actually lets you set parameters and the camera doesn't ignore ones it doesn't like can work. Most of the consumer grade cameras do not allow you to override settings and they use algorithms that give the best and brightest still image, but motion suffers as a result of it.

This video used a Texas Plate which are known to be great contrast plates for LPR, and he changed the letters and used an even more contrast letter sticker than the actual plate.

His example wasn't a true test unless you are looking at parked cars. And it was an ideal set-up, bright out and high-contrast Texas Plates. What about a dirty or rusty plate? What about a paper temporary tag?

How many perps stop for the camera like this freeze frame from his tests?

1627313394887.png

All I can tell you is when we had a door checker come thru here, my neighbor's with 4K reolinks, arlo, and ring did not produce a single image that the police could do anything with. Their cars were rummaged thru and were less than 10 feet from their camera. Meanwhile, the perp didn't come onto my driveway, but my 2MP optically zoomed to a pinch point on the public sidewalk 65 feet away got the clear shot for the police to find the person and my neighbors get their stuff back.
 
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In my first post I told you want was needed to make the pc work well with bi.

The people here are trying to save you money with the hard earned knowledge that they have acquired over time.

Reolink as well as many other equipment manufacturers pay reviewers for good reviews. Nobody here makes money from reviews.
I saw your post and will be taking your HDD/SSD suggestion into my planning,
Having it store locally and offload daily is probably better indeed.
Thats one thing ive learned, so thanks.

Also, you did mention you had an i7-4970 handling 15 cameras pushing 720MP/S with a CPU load of 20%,
but im not entirely sure how that translates. Is it 15 cameras x 4MP x 12fps or something?
I presume you are direct to disk recording all of them? How high does CPU load get when a couple of them detect motion?
That CPU is also significantly better than the i5-4590, it being 4c/8t instead of 4c/4t, and also 0.3Ghz faster too boot.
Would it be a fair guess to say the i5 would handle your setup, but at 40 to 50% load?
DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap and the optiplex can go up to 16Gb, so thats an easy bump.

And yeah I know a lot of manufacturers sweeten the deal for a good score,
I just purely looked at the picture quality which seemed pretty good at first glance.
But the lack of iframe control kinda breaks the deal on those Reolinks I guess, atleast for Blue Iris.

Most of us do not use actual LPR cameras to read plates. Almost any good quality camera that actually lets you set parameters and the camera doesn't ignore ones it doesn't like can work. Most of the consumer grade cameras do not allow you to override settings and they use algorithms that give the best and brightest still image, but motion suffers as a result of it.

This video used a Texas Plate which are known to be great contrast plates for LPR, and he changed the letters and used an even more contrast letter sticker than the actual plate.

His example wasn't a true test unless you are looking at parked cars. And it was an ideal set-up, bright out and high-contrast Texas Plates. What about a dirty or rusty plate? What about a paper temporary tag?

How many perps stop for the camera like this freeze frame from his tests?

View attachment 96298

All I can tell you is when we had a door checker come thru here, my neighbor's with 4K reolinks, arlo, and ring did not produce a single image that the police could do anything with. Their cars were rummaged thru and were less than 10 feet from their camera. Meanwhile, the perp didn't come onto my driveway, but my 2MP optically zoomed to a pinch point on the public sidewalk 65 feet away got the clear shot for the police to find the person and my neighbors get their stuff back.
Not being able to set whitebalance was indeed something that irked me on my shitty wyzecams.
They could have been alright if it was for just setting alone, but alas, automatic HDR..

Him choosing an advantageous plate is a bit skeevy I suppose,
though in my situation that doctored plate of his is still at a disadvantage.
Dutch number plates are about twice as big and quite loud as well;

1627314508312.png

He also wasn't just standing still, him running by seems to produce a sharp still.
That's particularly what caught my eye.

And I would wager that looking semi directly at a camera is a prerequisite for getting a good look at the face.
Atleast I dont think expensive cameras can fly around and change perspective for a better shot?
Well, excluding drones I suppose.

I guess its personal preference, but zooming a cam in that far shrinks the FOV significantly,
wouldn't that make it almost a gamble on if it will actually see something happening?
The maximum range I would have to worry about is about 35ft on a lit city road,
personally I think I would prefer a higher resolution overview without zooming
so I won't have to worry about nearby things happening out of shot.
 
Oh yes you have big @$$ plates the size of a car bumper LOL, so you should be fine.

Most of us have found the the overview type cameras do not do a good job in practice for IDENTIFY purposes, so we also put out a few optically zoomed varifocals zoomed in to pinch points or spots where people are likely to have to pass through.

Not quite fly around for a better shot, but this PTZ with autotracking does an incredible job! Used in conjunction with some overview cameras that act as spotters to tell this PTZ where to look, and you got a good system.

 
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I have a mix of 2 and 4 MP cameras. I run them in a mix of 15 FPS for the main coverage outside cameras and 8fps for the inside and the back yard bird feeder cameras. Eight (8) of the cameras have BI motion detection. Two (2) cameras are using motion processing in the camera and reporting the ONVIF events to BI. All cameras run n H.264 compression. All cameras are continuous record direct to disk. I use the Intel Quicksync processing on all cameras. I use substreams on all cameras that are processing BI motion.

The MP/Sec is an Important load indicator. It is way more important then the number of cameras There is a massive difference between a 2MP camera at 15FPS and a 8MP camera at 30FPS.

 
Oh yes you have big @$$ plates the size of a car bumper LOL, so you should be fine.

Most of us have found the the overview type cameras do not do a good job in practice for IDENTIFY purposes, so we also put out a few optically zoomed varifocals zoomed in to pinch points or spots where people are likely to have to pass through.

Not quite fly around for a better shot, but this PTZ with autotracking does an incredible job! Used in conjunction with some overview cameras that act as spotters to tell this PTZ where to look, and you got a good system.

Yeah our plates are huge, and we have to have them back AND front.
Much to the dismay of people with expensive sportscars. :lol:

You can have an overview camera be the director of a PTZ? Thats pretty neat!
Seems a smidge overkill for my wee 3 car parking lot out front, but definitely cool tech.
Also I think it might go bananas trying to track everything, its a pretty busy street.
For me it just needs to catch the plate of a truck when it scrapes off another car mirror about 20 to 30ft from my building.
Its a narrow street and happens when a city bus and a truck meet each other from opposite sides.
My shitty 1080p wyzecam already served this purpose once, but its 20$ and the quality matches the price.
I didnt even catch it with a motion detection, I just had a customer tell me their mirror was gone,
and I just scrubbed through the 24/7 recording until I saw it go flying, clipped it, and mailed it to them.
If it wasn't for the streetlight being right there, it would have missed it though.
But this cam appears to be dying (not surprised, honestly), so I kinda wanna find a cam thats a step up,
but preferably one that won't immediately sink my piggybank.
Same for the indoor cameras, they are all cheap wyze cams I once bought on a whim, but they are getting old.
Is there really nothing around 100 to 150 euros with more than 2MP that could pass as good enough for a small shop?
 
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