Motion Detection: Benefits on Camera vs in BI?

ToadRage

n3wb
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Hey guys,
I've been running BI for several years now and have started slowly adding more cameras to my setup. I'm thinking about adding a few Dahua starlight models based on everyone's high recommendations here. I would ideally like to setup these new cameras for full time recording as well as motion detection for alerts.

My questions are:

Is there an advantage to configuring motion detection on the camera itself instead of in Blue Iris?
Will this reduce the overhead of my BI server?
Can BI be notified from the camera if motion is detected and still fire motion events (If so, does ONVIF have something to do with this)?

Thanks guys!
 

marklyn

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Toad, Personally, for me, I use BI motion detect/alerts, etc., over the camera for 2 reasons. 1) Learning and tweaking motion/alerts with Blue Iris is common to all cameras/models so once you get the hang of tweaking everything with BI, it's one stop shopping for all of your configuration and tweaking efforts, 2)From what I've read, for most cameras, BI offers at least as good or better in many mid-lower range cameras those motion/alert/trigger abilities. With that being said, I do still slap a 64GB SD Card in my cameras and set up some basic motion detection on them. This is in the event that something happened inside the house that compromised my file server (theft, fire) and I'd at least have a few days video on each of the outdoor cams.
The only thing I know of to reduce overhead on the BI Server is if your computer is new enough to turn on Intel HD hardware acceleration (Yes (H.264) under Cameras tab. When I turned on mine, my CPU usage went from 80-90% down to around 40-45% average. Big CPU savings for me with 11 cameras.
Yes, BI can be notified from the camera if motion is detected and fire events. It has everything to do with the the "Get events with PullPointSubscription", under each camera's Video/Configure tab. But again, in my opinion and from what I've gathered from other experienced BI users, BI has a great motion detection system when you utilize and understand all of the trigger options. It took me a long time and a great deal of testing with most of the trigger features but I'm very happy with how they work and I only had to "learn" to be an expert in 1 software (BI) instead of 4-6 different camera model firmwares and their own IVS.
 

ToadRage

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Thanks marklyn,
I agree having BI as the central hub for all camera configuration is preferred as it just makes everything easier and cleaner. It also makes it easier to backup and restore configuration if needed. I was just wondering specifically how much additional CPU utilization could be saved if the camera hardware did the motion detection instead of the BI server (or is it just negligible). I imagine CPU goes up even more if higher resolution cameras are added with motion detection as more pixels are having to be accounted for.
 

marklyn

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Well, in my case it is moot. I have a dedicated pc running 24/7 and with the tweaks I've made using onboard HD accel, I'm very happy with the 45% CPU usage (on average), . It would be interesting if someone had the time to configure their system with the workload on BI and then switched it as you're suggesting to see what the difference is. I'd be surprised if it's much if any better than using the HD accel though.
 
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