We are in the process of buying a house in a rural area where the only internet available other than satellite is fixed wireless. The max available speed is 6 Mbps down and 1Mbps up and no data caps. Will this be a viable solution for viewing hi def security cameras on a computer? I hope I am posting to the correct forum. If not someone please advise me where to post on this subject matter. Thanks
Minimum internet speed
- Thread starter 63Flane
- Start date
Remember with any setup where you record locally, the internet speed only matters for remote viewing.
You can make it work with 1 Mbps or even much less. I'd suggest using Blue Iris on a Windows PC as your recording device, because Blue Iris has very good bit rate controls for remote viewing. Mobile apps by default are limited to 512 Kbps (half of 1 Mbps) bit rate. If you connect to Blue Iris using a web browser through the UI3 page, make sure to set the setting "Maximum H.264 Kbps" somewhere below 1000.
Don't expect amazing video quality when viewing remotely, but you can in fact stream HD or even 4K with a bit rate of only a few hundred Kbps and make it look fairly good as long as nothing is moving in the scene.
Also thanks to the efforts of SpaceX and others, much better satellite internet will be available in most parts of the world within a few years. Make sure to keep an eye on that!
You can make it work with 1 Mbps or even much less. I'd suggest using Blue Iris on a Windows PC as your recording device, because Blue Iris has very good bit rate controls for remote viewing. Mobile apps by default are limited to 512 Kbps (half of 1 Mbps) bit rate. If you connect to Blue Iris using a web browser through the UI3 page, make sure to set the setting "Maximum H.264 Kbps" somewhere below 1000.
Don't expect amazing video quality when viewing remotely, but you can in fact stream HD or even 4K with a bit rate of only a few hundred Kbps and make it look fairly good as long as nothing is moving in the scene.
Also thanks to the efforts of SpaceX and others, much better satellite internet will be available in most parts of the world within a few years. Make sure to keep an eye on that!
That info is reassuring. The thing is I live in California and the cameras will be at my son's house in Arkansas. So all my viewing will be remote. Currently he has a Night Owl 1080 HD-AHD DVR setup with 11- 1080P cameras and 3 - 720P cameras. Haven't had many problems with it. But his rated speed now is 25Mbps down and 4Mbps up. I'd like to upgrade to a PoE system with 10 to 16 4MP or higher cameras. But I'm thinking that won't work with that much bandwidth at the slower speed described above. Would it work if I use a PoE NVR and view 1 or 2 cameras at a time?
sebastiantombs
Known around here
Remember that the view of those cameras on the NVR is a composite view, not the full bit rate of all the cameras combined into one signal. Just a guess, but I'd venture that if it's 1080P it would be on the high side.
I have no relevant experience with modern NVRs to know how they do remote streaming. Do they actually build a composite view into one stream for remote viewing, like Blue Iris does? What if you switch to viewing a single camera's main stream? Does it then re-encode the video at a lower bit rate, or does it just proxy the main stream to you at its full bit rate? Because no way would a respectable main stream fit into a 1 Mbps stream otherwise.
If the NVR doesn't actually re-encode any of the video, then it probably won't work well at all to view remotely on a 1 Mbps connection. Blue Iris definitely does re-encode the video which is why I am confident that it works fine on 1 Mbps.
If the NVR doesn't actually re-encode any of the video, then it probably won't work well at all to view remotely on a 1 Mbps connection. Blue Iris definitely does re-encode the video which is why I am confident that it works fine on 1 Mbps.
At my California house I have 11 3MP and 3 2MP cameras on a PoE switch. Also connected to the switch is a 16 Ch NVR I currently use for recording and of course the output to my AT&T modem/router. I have the NVR connected by the VGA output to my computer monitor. I also have Blue Iris 5 on another Dell I bought for that purpose. I have no problem viewing the cameras on the monitor with VGA. But as soon as I open Blue Iris the processor temperature on the Dell sky rockets and the fans go ballistic. So I pretty much don't use it. Just the VGA fed monitor. My concern with setting up Blue Iris at my son's house is it will just burn up the computer. Maybe even start a fire. I realize this is off topic from my original question. But I feel it is applicable to what I plan to setup for him and why
Any computer built within the last 10+ years should throttle itself when thermal limits are reached, to prevent failures and disasters. Only defective hardware or, you know, running the computer in an active oven, would make it start a fire (and even then it would probably just shut down and stop working). Your computer is probably very underspecced for the load you are putting on it. Read Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris and Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage. Especially since the introduction of sub stream support, Blue Iris can be made to run very efficiently so it works even on slower hardware if you need it to.
My Dell has pretty good specs. It's an I-7 8700 CPU @ 3.20 GHz 6 core with 32.0 GB of ram. I replaced the 1TB HDD with a 500Gig Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD for the OS and program. I also installed a 6TB Purple Drive drive for recording. This was all fresh in Jan. 2019. But as soon as I open Blue Iris the processor heats up. I tried it again today and within a minute or less it topped 200 Deg F. It did throttle down by the sound of the fans. But I was to busy closing BI to notice the temp at that point. But thanks for the link to Optimizing BI. To many people using it without this problem. So I'm sure there's something I can do. Maybe the answer will be in that link. Thanks again.
So my machine is an I7-8700 running on an ASUS Prime H370-Plus micro ATX motherboard. 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4 3000 memory. EVGA 550W PS. EVGA GTX1050 Ti graphics card. Additional NIC on a PCI card. Cooling is a Corsair H100i cooler. 'C' drive is a M.2 256GB PCI-E by Intel. A WD 500GB Blue SSD for JPGs and such. Main video storage disks are three WD 10TB Purple drives spinning at 7200rpm. Besides the CPU cooling fans, there are 6 additional case fans.
I am running a total of 18 cams, 4 x 4MP and 14 x 2MP at the highest bitrates allowed, 15 FPS. Continuous recording 24/7 direct to disk in BI, all using NVidia CUDA Hardware Accelerated Decode, and I am not using substreams.
The numbers are: 11,500kB/s, 675MP/s, CPU 26%, GPU 40%, Memory 31%, and the IP cam NIC card is running at 85 Mbps. The PC pulls 107 Watts.
The only thing running on this PC besides BI is the NTP service and Norton.
My system NEVER throttles for heat. The CPU never gets above 49C (120F). The fans are always running slow. The power supply fan has an eco mode where it only runs if it is needed. It has never turned on.
Something is wrong with your server if it is having heat problems with such a small load.
FWIW, many fixed wireless ISP's (such as AT&T cellular-based fixed wireless) employ carrier-grade NAT so therefore no public WAN IP is available. In other words, remote access of the LAN serviced by that fixed wireless cannot be achieved with conventional means.
Some fixed wireless ISP's can provide a business-class, static and public WAN IP at considerable expense in most cases, but asking should cost you just some of your time.