So my cameras arrived Wednesday, and I've been playing/testing them with BI since that evening. In one word... AWESOME!
I've got 3 assorted starlight cams going so far (from Empiretech@aliexpress... a mini dome, a turret, and a bullet... the ones that are highly regarded on IPCT). They're streaming at 25 & 30fps/h264/10kbps to my aging daily driver pc (i5-2500k/8gb) and it is averaging 30% cpu use. It seems to be working fine on the non-dedicated PC, but I ordered a standalone rig to be sure... I'm so impressed with BI already that it was an easy purchase decision for me. Maybe someday down the road I'll get a DVR as a 'secondary remote storage' to hide in my attic in case a thief makes of with the BI rig. If that happens now, I'll have to get SD cards out of the cams.
So far BI has everything I need with it's 'Object Detection' settings, and they are working very reliably. IIRC, many folks were having issues with their NVR missing the initial (critical) seconds of footage during IVS events. I suppose that could be limited by hardware latency (maybe a firmware fix someday?), and I noticed BI starts off behaving similarly with default settings. However BI has a 'pretrigger buffer' setting that lets me include however many seconds of footage before the event happens so every event includes every single juicy second of action. For example say I setup an object detector A<->B line (like dahua ivs), instead of just showing footage of me crossing that line, the event includes footage of me walking in to the room before I crossed it.
There are a whole lot of features in BI, but after playing around they are all easy for the average tech-oriented dude to tackle, and it's very nice to have them to begin with. I'm looking forward to using the digital I/O features to integrate my cams with the rest of my alarm system. There are turn key devices to do that, but I'm just going to use an arduino (got several laying around).
The only thing I haven't played with is the phone apps (waiting on my dedicated rig to arrive from ebay next week, then I buy BI full version and apps to go with it). However even without the apps I'm getting prompt emails and texts for events (you gotta setup 'push' delivery with gmail, then the emails come within seconds). The webserver also works great both at home and away (accessing remotely through openvpn); that feature, along with the sms and emails has already got many of my friends very interested. So if that's any indication, I'm sure the app will be easy breezy.
About the only complaint I can think of... having to setup the cameras through a browser. BI is controlling all the PTZ stuff itself (ir/exposure...), so after initial cam config (user/IP/...) the cam webpage becomes unecessary really.
Hope this helps folks on the fence,
Kev
