Is there a Blue Iris equivalent for Linux?

[CanCuba]

As @mrvelous01 mentioned, you might have a look at Bluecherry:

Bluecherry

Powerful Video Surveillance Software

www.bluecherrydvr.com

What keeps pulling me back to consider Blue Iris and Frigate is their support for AI which Bluecherry seems to lack. I like the idea of offloading AI to a GPU or Coral TPU for object detection and facial recognition. I'll post another thread but I've had the cops reviewing my footage 3 times in the last week and half. Electric scooters are stolen quite frequently here and being able to review footage of just scooters would make my life easier. I've just spent 3 hours reviewing the footage from the past three nights only to have the suspect appear in the last 4 hours I was reviewing. Murphy's Law, right?

 

[wpiman]

I ran BI on an ESXi VM for years running Windows and it was fine. You can do all sorts of pass through, but with sub-streams-- just having enough CPUs is more than adequate.

But to Fenderman's point, eventually I added some more cameras, and the other VMs on that machine were doing new tasks and that machine was getting well utilized, so BI now runs on an old Xeon with ECC memory. It is very stable, but maintaining another physical machine can be a PITA. I recommend getting a motherboard that supports IPMI.

I've thought about getting something like a thread ripper and trying to run BI inside of a VM Ware docker container. it would be a PITA to set up, bit easier to maintain.

 

[concord]

As I am a recovering Unix Sysadmin (30+years of HP-UX, Solaris, and Redhat at the office, Ubuntu and Mint at home) I am partial to *nix solutions. I recently purchased an HP DL380G9 with a ridiculous amount of RAM, CPU, and disk, and have been quite happy moving my apps from Ubuntu server on desktop PC's and turning the PC's off.

My camera needs are simple. Motion recording (zone masking-damn trees), remote and local viewing of 16 various IP cams in and around my home. So far ZM has been a CPU killer and for no apparent reason. I boot, it runs half a day, then eats all the CPUs, then I reboot again. After I figured out the "zoning" part things were better but local viewing through the "Montage" was a disaster. Follow the forums - don't click Montage! I built a crappy HTML page to pull the live video and hit the browser limit of 6 cams (yeah, use ports, I know), but it's still kludgy.

Bluecherry has had a few moments too, but the setup was ridiculously simple. I am still working on motion detection and PTZ and although some docs are lacking the developer is very responsive and the price is very fair (still in 30 day trial). With the big box running Ubuntu Server and KVM it has been easy to spin up new VMs in just a few minutes. I am reasonably sure that Bluecherry could be what I am looking for.

Thanks again.

Since you are looking for Linux-based with only live viewing and motion recording only, have you checked out Agent server by ISpy and motionEye? I had Bluecherry about 5-6 years ago, but the one thing that was missing for me was 24/7 recording along with motion recording. I was looking at writing a plugin for the Qt client (as that is what I used at work) to scan the 24/7 hour recording for motion using OpenCV, however I had an issue with one camera and tried to get tech support, even allowing them to access my system, but they never got back to me, so I switched to BI for the continuous + trigger recordings.

I was mostly a software developer but also a sysadmin, tech, networking, etc. for our lab of HP-UX (PA-RISC) workstations, RAID servers, along with Windows desktops and HP DL Windows webservers. However, the IT group started to reign in separate group systems and started to turn them into VMWare VMs and we were retiring our legacy HP-UX systems, just as I was leaving and my replacement was more of a software developer/mathematics guy, with limited admin/tech/network abelites, so it's working out better for him.

MOTIONEYE NVR PAN/TILT

MOTIONEYE NVR PAN/TILT: motionEye is a web based NVR (Network Video Recorder). It is a web front end for the motion daemon. It is developed in python2.7 More detail on motionEye can be found at: https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye Instalation instructions can be found a…

www.instructables.com

iSpy - Open Source Camera Security Software

Open source camera security software. iSpy provides security, surveillance, motion detection, online access and remote control

www.ispyconnect.com

 

[lane777smith]

My HIGHLY suggest opinion is to look at Scrypted NVR. I'm running it in Docker on a Ubuntu Server and it's AWESOME. Scrypted You can see a running Demo at Scrypted Network Video Recorder

 

[CanCuba]

In my humble opinion, installing Unraid provides the easiest scaffolding for VM's and dockers.
Unraid provides a web-based interface for interacting with the server, including configuring drive storage,
users, dockers, VM's, shares, and apps. But there's no requirement to configure any storage - all you need is one
hard disk to tinker with. Unraid also includes a 30-day trial... meaning you could download, fire it up, and
try a Windows VM or a docker.

Unraid provides thousands (1889) of pre-built dockers, including Blue Iris, Frigate, Zoneminder , Shinobi, etc.
View attachment 164464
View attachment 164466

All the VM functionality is straightforward with templates for these Operating Systems:
View attachment 164463
I currently have five VM's configured, for example (including a Windows 10 instance):
View attachment 164467
The VM's are configured using Unraid's web interface (here's part of the config for my Debian MQTT Server):
View attachment 164468

And Unraid is built on Slackware, so you can always SSH in and use the command line.
View attachment 164465

Anyway, something to think about.

Whoa. I missed the BI Docker my first look at your post. That sounds promising. Even if I have to pay for the privilege of using Unraid, it may be worth a hard look.

 

[CanCuba]

A decent thread where someone talks about having Unraid running a BI Docker and a Frigate Docker to make sure of BI's UI and Frigate offloading AI to a Google Coral.

This forum even gets a mention.

 

[Cold-Lemonade]

I use Frigate ver. 0.12 on a little Minisforum GK41 with a Celeron J4125 running Ubuntu server 22.04. Frigate handles motion masks, zones, etc. and has very good object detection if you add a Google Coral to your set up. However, I don't think Frigate supports PTZ cameras yet. I believe the developers are working on that for the forthcoming version.

 

[mrvelous01]

An update on my bluecherry experience ... I installed the server component on an Ubuntu VM and the client on an Ubuntu desktop. I had a few problems configuring some cameras and the devs were very responsive. After a whirlwind of back and forth, and even punching a hole in my firewall for their offshore developer to login and look at the database on the server VM, they kind of fell off the radar. There was a promise of a pending release for the desktop client but I haven't seen it yet. I am not getting a response to a request for more docs to configure PTZ and the desktop client seems to be glitchy when it comes to switching streams. I'm going to shut this one down for a while and look at other unix options.

 

[CanCuba]

An update on my bluecherry experience ... I installed the server component on an Ubuntu VM and the client on an Ubuntu desktop. I had a few problems configuring some cameras and the devs were very responsive. After a whirlwind of back and forth, and even punching a hole in my firewall for their offshore developer to login and look at the database on the server VM, they kind of fell off the radar. There was a promise of a pending release for the desktop client but I haven't seen it yet. I am not getting a response to a request for more docs to configure PTZ and the desktop client seems to be glitchy when it comes to switching streams. I'm going to shut this one down for a while and look at other unix options.

That's unfortunate. Thank you for sharing your experience. I hope it saves others time not having to experiment with current iteration of this software.

 

[Cold-Lemonade]

@mrvelous01 Try Frigate and run Wireguard server so you can see your cameras when you're away from home. It's amazing. I completely recommend it. There is no need to open holes in your firewall.

 

[Left Coast Geek]

@mrvelous01 Try Frigate and run Wireguard server so you can see your cameras when you're away from home. It's amazing. I completely recommend it. There is no need to open holes in your firewall.

well, if the wireguard server isn't running ON the firewall router, you need to setup a port forward for wireguard (unless you are running uPnP, which allows any software on any system on your network to punch its own firewall holes without bothering to tell you).

 

[Cold-Lemonade]

well, if the wireguard server isn't running ON the firewall router, you need to setup a port forward for wireguard (unless you are running uPnP, which allows any software on any system on your network to punch its own firewall holes without bothering to tell you).

Yes. That's why I run Wireguard server on my router that uses dd-wrt. But I believe ASUS also makes routers with Wireguard server.

 

[Left Coast Geek]

but you can't assume the person you're replying to has the same setup.

 

[Cold-Lemonade]

but you can't assume the person you're replying to has the same setup.

My point is that they need to invest in that equipment.

 

[biggen]

Yeah I run WireGuard in a Debian VM so I can access my home LAN. Pretty easy to setup with PIVPN.

 

[mrvelous01]

Hello and thanks for the suggestion. I use pfSense firewall and block all cameras from internet access and VPN in to view them live. I don't often find myself remotely looking at previously recorded video so thats not going to be a problem. I'll look at Frigate shortly.

 

[spuls]

Shinobi is quite good and includes a lot of plugins and 1-click installers for hardware support (nvidia, coral.io,...)

 

[mrvelous01]

I am trying out Shinobi right now, thanks.

 

[kd4e]

Has anyone looked at Bluecherry with their Deepstack integration enabled?

Some reviews suggest that it approaches the performance of Frigate with Coral.

 

[mrvelous01]

A few years ago I tried Bluecherry for a few months but not with any AI. Things were not always quite "polished". I contacted the devs about some issues and even gave them ssh access through my firewall to the Bluecherry VM so they could tinker and test. Seemed like there was always another problem. After a while they stopped replying and tinkering and I lost interest. Scared the hecks out of me when he asked me to allow an IP through my firewall from eastern block europe which is apparently where most of their code writers are.