Questions for New BI4 Install w/ Hikvision DS-2CD2332 Cameras?

[Jettubby]

Hello. New to the forum and been reading for a few days. Decided to order 2 Hikvision DS-2CD2332 (2.8mm) cams to use in the home indoors. For now plan on using BI4 and an i7 Laptop on a wired network connection on my gigabit network. I have a few questions I could not find definitive answers in other threads.....

- If I wanted to store the H.264 videos for 2x DS-2CD2332 cameras in continuous recording mode on my laptop's HD, how large would the laptop HD need to be? Understand size of the files have to do with the bitrate recorded? I have an SSD on the laptop used for the Win 7 OS and a 500GB secondary internal drive as well. Maybe a better question would be how many hours could be stored for two cameras on the 500GB drive?

- Second option is to use the laptop to run BI4 and store the videos on a larger USB drive connected to my NAS and that is currently in my locked safe. Would rather have the video files locked up anyway. Any issues in BI4 saving the videos continually over the network to an external USB drive on the NAS? Does this noticeably slow down the network?

- If I wanted to view/work on BI4 remote from my Win7 desktop to my laptop with BI4 installed; what is the best way to do this; Remote desktop or does BI4 have built in network access?

Thanks.

 

[chipreibel]

Hey, Jettubby. I am also new here and most (if not all) of the members here know WAY more than I do.

Here is a (link) to a website that you can use to calculate bandwidth and storage.

Running the (2) cameras full-bore at 12FPS, you can store ~18 hours of video on your 500GB drive (at the full 3MP). If you back it down to 5FPS (still at 3MP), you can get ~42 hours. If you back the resolution down to 1.3MP (still at 5FPS) you can get almost 78 hours of constant recording.

I don't know much about BI (I don't have a PC that will run it and don't currently have the funds to buy one) so I'm not sure what options it has for recording to NAS (instead of recording to NAS directly from the cameras). In the case of recording to NAS directly, you need to log into each individual camera to view the footage that it recorded (which was a non-starter for me).

I'll be running the iVMS-4200 software on my old PC with a dedicated 2TB HDD to get me up and running. In the future, also recording to NAS for redundancy is likely...

 

[fenderman]

You can actually have BI record to both nas and you local drive simultaneously by setting up duplicate cameras (clone) and recording one to nas and one local..the extra camera can be marked hidden and not displayed on the screen...
Using motion detection can significantly increase the amount of recording time...even if you make it very sensitive...you can record locally using motion and continuously to the nas if you like..
You should not notice a network slow down particular if you network is gigabit..
For remote viewing BI has a webserver but you cannot change any settings...your options are windows remote desktop (if you have the pro version of windows) or something like teamviewer..note that teamviewer adds lots of overhead to the cpu use while using it with blue iris but its only temporary while the session is active...

 

[Jettubby]

Yes continuous recording is probably not the way to go. I'd love to be able to record at least 4 or 5 days continuously so if something happens I can go back, but that's a ton of hard drive space. Motion detection might be the way to go but taxing on the computer. Not a big deal though as I have an Asus G73 laptop to devote to it. I"m just mainly trying to figure out how I want to record and save video/captures. I don't know how folks record 30 days of recordings. That's many terabytes of data.

Laptop hard drive cons is it's not secure if someone steals the laptop.
Cloud storage is not ideal as it hogs bandwidth.
A USB hard drive connected to the NAS may be the best way to go as it would be locked in the safe and I can get a large drive. My NAS only has USB 2.0 ugh.

Will BI4 allow recording to Google Drive/Dropbox? Maybe motion detection/snapshots saved to the cloud would work?

Any personal suggestion from experience is appreciated. ;-)

 

[aaronwt]

Hard drives are so inexpensive now. You can get a hard drive with 4TB of storage for $140 or less. 6TB drives for under $230.