Motion Detection/SMD Questions/Issues

[wittaj]

But enough of the debating because it comes down to ones comfort level with a particular program LOL. Personally I don't find BI and Windows complicated like you do, but to each their own.

Your issue was - Can a VMS system accept motion triggers from a Dahua camera.

A Dahua NVR can.

BI can with a series of checkboxes.

Sounds like the other VMS systems can't based on your experience.

So it comes down to if you want to use Dahua cameras, do you want to use a VMS system that you have to use its AI analytics or a system that can accept Dahua AI analytics.

Like everything in life, there are compromises.

I will compromise a fancy app in favor of BI that has more functionality and a great price.

You may favor Scrypted or some other VMS for its "easier" use and setup even if it costs more.

Others go the Ring or Arlo type route because in 10 minutes the camera is up and running on a decent app on their phone. They don't care that the quality won't be good enough to ID a perp at night.

Others may do something else.

And those with the resources will develop their own thing to accomplish what they want.

 

[MR2]

somewhat of a side note, if you want a higher reliability outside of making sure you are correctly locating the right devices, I'd highly recommend using external AI Processing the built in stuff is not particularly accurate at the best of times and BI is a ridiculously cheap way to do that

 

[jharrell]

Personally I don't find BI and Windows complicated like you do, but to each their own.

My issue with BI is more about it requiring Windows, I no longer wish to maintain a windows system for anything important, I am trying to simply my life in that respect, I have done that sort of thing for many years and made a good living doing so, I don't wish to do that at home as well. If BI ran on Linux say in docker then I would probably consider using it like just about every other useful piece of server software I run at home.

Your issue was - Can a VMS system accept motion triggers from a Dahua camera.

A Dahua NVR can.

Yeah I would hope so at minimum...

I will compromise a fancy app in favor of BI that has more functionality and a great price.

HomeKit with Scrypted is free and works great with very clear and easy to setup yet powerful parameters. The one thing it doesn't do is continuous recording or above 1080P for clips, due to using iCloud storage, otherwise its does exactly what I want for home use and is my primary daily driver, the ability to quickly pull up my cameras from anywhere is extremely valuable along with the wife actually able to understand it. Plus HomeKit is doing other things like thermostats, garage door, lights etc all in one easy to use app, hard to beat.

I do want high res continuous recording of my cameras which Synology gives me and it works well and has with a few generations of Dahua cameras going back before AI features and HomeKit, I simply used to accept the false motion triggers on the timeline and would have to wade through them if something happened. Now my cameras seem to have decent AI abilities to get good discrimination and are hampered by a combination of Dahuas obtuse settings and Synology insistence on camera admin access for IVS or only supporting plain motion events with onvif (like most onvif implementations). Its simply annoying and I wanted to put that info out here for others since it was not made clear anywhere what the issues where that I could find. Dahua finally added animal support but then left it out of SMD otherwise I would just use that as it pretty close to a simple give me AI switch that Dahua has that works with most onvif software I might go back to it and forget about the animals which is an annoying compromise.

Maybe one day all the NVR/VMS systems will support full Onvif profile M analytics and this won't be an issue, not even sure if what Dahua is doing is Profile M yet with IVS, but it doesn't matter if only Blue Iris and Dahua software works with it.

 

[jharrell]

somewhat of a side note, if you want a higher reliability outside of making sure you are correctly locating the right devices, I'd highly recommend using external AI Processing the built in stuff is not particularly accurate at the best of times and BI is a ridiculously cheap way to do that

I find the Dahua AI decent at identifying stuff, it's simply a mess in configuring with odd choices throughout and limitations like no animals until recently, but only in IVS not SMD or why is SMD and IVS two separate thing to begin with??? How about I setup AI detection, draw the zones of interest and say whether it puts out motion events or more specific detection events so it can work with anything and be much more clear about it? This allows the camera to do the heavy lifting of AI processing rather than having to run server hardware that can handle it.

HomeKits nice because the AI is done on hubs like the Apple TV without any special config and without noticeable overhead or power draw. Setting up BlueIris or other off board AI typically requires more hefty hardware requirements that for instance my Synology won't do or will peg the CPU when it does. At least Blue Iris supports the camera doing the work if you know how to set it up on both sides.

 

[MR2]

the SMD camera's I have let you do some of the SMD functionality within the IVS rules (create the IVS rule and area's then tick the boxes to say only on vehicle or humans), I still find they are not that accurate nor that flexible for what I'd like to do