open source Blue iris alternative

IAmATeaf

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Will Linux or freebsd lower power usage of a PC?
 

looney2ns

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You are shooting yourself in the foot by trying to re-invent the wheel.
Blue Iris has been actively developed for over 20 yrs, it's older than you. ;)

You can purchase a very capable and very energy efficient off lease Computer to run BI on for less then $200 from Ebay.
It will run at 30Watts or less.
Turn off Windows Updates, and Bi Automatic Updates, and it will run very reliable.
Look for an HP EliteDesk I5-8500 machine on Ebay.
 

AdlerE

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If you want something with powerful AI then definitely take a look at Frigate. When used with DoubleTake to train the facial recognition it's great. DeepStack is not impressive. CompreFace is amazing! My system will text me with something like "Jenny the cat 98% pooped on the south lawn at 2:32am. All open source.
My stack looks like:
Home Assistant - UI
Frigate - DRV
DoubleTake - Train/personalize AI
CompreFace - facial recognition
 

H0va4life

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If you want something with powerful AI then definitely take a look at Frigate. When used with DoubleTake to train the facial recognition it's great. DeepStack is not impressive. CompreFace is amazing! My system will text me with something like "Jenny the cat 98% pooped on the south lawn at 2:32am. All open source.
My stack looks like:
Home Assistant - UI
Frigate - DRV
DoubleTake - Train/personalize AI
CompreFace - facial recognition
Thanks for sharing! I am just getting started in my setup. I am half tempted in grabbing one of those AI google coral usb devices to take off processing load from my system. Are you processing everything locally or are these cloud based AI solutions?
 

AdlerE

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I'm happily paranoid. I do everything locally. My video is saved on a ZFS NAS (TrueNAS). I have a 2nd cheap NAS (OpenMediaVault on an Odroid H2) at a remote location that has backups of high probability events. Just in case someone brakes into my house and takes my main system. That Google Coral AI ASIC is literally x100 faster then my Xeon CPU! Can put it on a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately they are hard to get at the moment. Normally they should cost about $70.
 
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H0va4life

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I am looking for a good Blue iris alternative. I need motion detection and ideally AI analysis to flat video to make finding incidents easier correting video fisheye would be helpful too as i currently have a doorbell cam and am looking to add a few more bullet cameras. any suggestions?
Check out the homelab and home automation groups on reddit - this is a good place but definitely youll find tons of information there.
 

H0va4life

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I'm a happily paranoid. I do everything locally. My video is saved on a ZFS NAS (TrueNAS). I have a 2nd cheap NAS (OpenMediaVaulton on an Odroid H2) at a remote location that has backups of high probability events. Just in case someone brakes into my house and takes my main system. That Google Coral AI ASIC is literally x100 faster then my Xeon CPU! Can put it on a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately they are hard to get at the moment. Normally they should cost about $70.
Yeah I see a few sellers on amazon for just over $100 - I am in the US btw.

I just received an "old" dell optiplex off ebay for just over $100. I am unsure if I want to keep it a windows machine and then run home assistant or whatever off a VM since I am a total newb. Or just take my main drive (I had a 512gb m2 sata drive laying around) and put something like home assistant on it.
 

AdlerE

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Does a Google Coral in any way shape or form require a connection to Google? If so I already don't trust it.
No way. If they did something like that nobody would use them. I have spent hours in WireShark looking for calls. Last people I want to have my data -from inside my house- is Google.
 

PatPend

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If you want something with powerful AI then definitely take a look at Frigate. When used with DoubleTake to train the facial recognition it's great. DeepStack is not impressive. CompreFace is amazing! My system will text me with something like "Jenny the cat 98% pooped on the south lawn at 2:32am. All open source.
My stack looks like:
Home Assistant - UI
Frigate - DRV
DoubleTake - Train/personalize AI
CompreFace - facial recognition
Any chance you could post a quick tutorial on your setup?
 

AdlerE

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Any chance you could post a quick tutorial on your setup?
It's very much like this one. The Asus card used here is also using the Coral chips. Its WAY overkill though. You only need one chip, not a card full of them. I have trained my system to turn on the sprinklers when certain animals walk on my grass. Dogs, cats or anything that might take a dump. If somebody not in my family goes close to my car, a light starts flashing and I get a text msg.

This one is also worth a watch.
 
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H0va4life

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Any chance you could post a quick tutorial on your setup?
You can also check out this guys channel if you are more into using blue iris and a windows environment. This solution uses your local hardware for AI processing instead of a coral.


Here is one where he does AI locally but on his own hardware, again in a windows environment:

 
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wittaj

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You can also check out this guys channel if you are more into using blue iris and a windows environment. He is using a cloud based solution for AI processing tho instead of a coral.


Here is one where he does AI locally but on his own hardware, again in a windows environment:

This is with Blue Iris that the OP is looking for alternatives on....and these videos are so old that the AI has since been integrated with BI and is way easier to implement now than when these videos were made and it was considered more 3rd party tools...
 

H0va4life

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This is with Blue Iris that the OP is looking for alternatives on....and these videos are so old that the AI has since been integrated with BI and is way easier to implement now than when these videos were made and it was considered more 3rd party tools...
I didn't reply to the OP, I replied to someone else who is just getting started. Interesting you mention that AI is integrated with BI but I do not see that as a feature on BI's web page, you'd think that'd be all over since its a hot buzz word. I am just getting started and can be totally wrong.
 

H0va4life

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This is with Blue Iris that the OP is looking for alternatives on....and these videos are so old that the AI has since been integrated with BI and is way easier to implement now than when these videos were made and it was considered more 3rd party tools...
can you show a youtube video for reference demonstrating the new integration in BI?
 

fenderman

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I didn't reply to the OP, I replied to someone else who is just getting started. Interesting you mention that AI is integrated with BI but I do not see that as a feature on BI's web page, you'd think that'd be all over since its a hot buzz word. I am just getting started and can be totally wrong.
Blue iris is developed by one person. He does not update the website often. This is the new AI integration for BI, previously it was with deepstack.
 

AdlerE

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can you show a youtube video for reference demonstrating the new integration in BI?
A bit OT but I after watching the video I saw something called "deepquest" in his settings. Some googling lead me back to a 2019 thread here by gentlepumpkin. My guess is Blue Iris uses a online API to access most likely Google Tensor Processing Units (Edge chips in Coral available 2018) for a monthly fee. If so this would be very effective at identifying a huge list of objects - toilets to cows.- with very few false positives. Not faces to names though. Best of all you don't have to try and buy the Google Coral chips. As for identifying "Gary the mailman" it seems they are using DeepStack. I don't see how they are teaching the AI faces to names. DeepStack is... mehh IMHO. CompreFace is a lot better. When "Gary the mailmain" is seen on my cameras I just drag and drop a few pictures of him into DoubleTake and it teaches the AI who he is. Same with the evil cat "Jenny" down the road. I don't want my sprinklers blasting my kids cat. Just Jenny the pooper cat. Here is the ipcamtalk thread I found from 2019 btw.
 

wittaj

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A bit OT but I after watching the video I saw something called "deepquest" in his settings. Some googling lead me back to a 2019 thread here by gentlepumpkin. My guess is Blue Iris uses a online API to access most likely Google Tensor Processing Units (Edge chips in Coral available 2018) for a monthly fee. If so this would be very effective at identifying a huge list of objects - toilets to cows.- with very few false positives. Not faces to names though. Best of all you don't have to try and buy the Google Coral chips. As for identifying "Gary the mailman" it seems they are using DeepStack. I don't see how they are teaching the AI faces to names. DeepStack is... mehh IMHO. CompreFace is a lot better. When "Gary the mailmain" is seen on my cameras I just drag and drop a few pictures of him into DoubleTake and it teaches the AI who he is. Same with the evil cat "Jenny" down the road. I don't want my sprinklers blasting my kids cat. Just Jenny the pooper cat. Here is the ipcamtalk thread I found from 2019 btw.
That is one of the many 3rd party tools before AI became integrated with Blue Iris. Some people still run that for the finer granular aspects, but most are going to the integration with BI. First integration was DeepStack but it has since switched to SenseAI/CodeProject.

With BI if you want to identify "Gary the mailman" you tell it to capture faces and then you assign a name to the unknowns. Most of us have found it to be gimmicky and not accurate, but fun to toy with.
 
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