quick check before I order more hardware

[knighty]

hi

I'm running a 16 channel analog dvr system right now, with 12 cameras all recording 24/7 onto 14tb of hard drives

need to add more cameras soon, need at least 22 total

planning to switch to IP cameras, I've ordered a DaHua HDBW4300R-Z HD 3MP camera and POE switch to try out the camera and see what it's like

I like to record 24/4

if I record direct to disk CPU load should be low yeah? (running core2duo right now, happy to upgrade)


for remote viewing/playback (cctv computer is hidden) can I watch the cameras just like I'm sitting at the blue iris machine ?

can I watch more than one camera at once, scan through them and have them all keep in sync with each other (show the same time/date)?


can I record to multiple hard drives ? - current system spans storage over different drives, when one drive is full it moves onto the next one

if not, I guess I'll have to run freenas or something like that, then put the drives in JABOD - if I do that is playback still the same ?


thanks for reading

hope you guys can help

Alan

 

[bp2008]

Hello. I'll try to answer some of your questions.

Blue Iris CPU load is rarely what I would call "low". Direct-to-disc is important to reduce CPU usage. So is hardware accelerated decoding. Core 2 Duo is very old, slow, and inefficient. You can get a refurbished i5-4570 or i5-4590 system from ebay for around $300, complete with a Windows license. Though if you intend to have 22+ IP cameras you should go for an i7 instead. Refurbished i7-4790 systems can be had for around $500 if you look hard enough. Or you can build your own/find refurbished with a skylake i7-6700 or i7-6700k if that suits you. It will just cost more.

There are many ways to do remote playback with Blue Iris. Certain remote desktop tools like Splashtop will stream your desktop at a high frame rate, but also with high CPU usage. Better if you can run USB and a display connection (HDMI / DisplayPort / whatever) from your hidden location. The web interface or mobile apps are also an option, but not as functional.

You can view all the cameras at once with Blue Iris, no problem. Or you can cycle through them automatically, also no problem.

Blue Iris can embed timestamps or you can have the cameras each embed their own timestamp. Or both. Me personally, I set each of my cameras to sync their time with an NTP server and let the camera do the timestamp. That way the timestamp is there in direct-to-disc recordings, even though the timestamp is usually uglier when the camera adds it.

You can record to multiple hard drives. It is a bit complicated to set up, but you can make different cameras record to different drives, or you can make Blue Iris move clips from one drive to another when the first drive fills up. If you want to fill one drive, and then fill the other, without Blue Iris moving files around all the time, you should use drive pooling software. I use StableBit DrivePool to pool two 3TB drives to store backups. I'm sure there are other ways that don't cost money but I can't recommend one.

I would avoid saving to a network drive (e.g. freenas) if I were you. It may work fine most of the time but it would be a little faster and more reliable saving to local drives.

 

[knighty]

hi

thanks for the reply

if I need more CPU power for direct to disk (thought I might) I'll probably go with a server chip - slightly slower but I could have a lot more cores, which will help with the multiple cameras I think ?
(I'm good with hardware, have been building computers since I was a kid)

the CCTV system I use right now has pretty terrible software, but it does work (if bugg)

there's a server program (for the cctv system) and a client program

client program is for remote live viewing and playback etc..

does blue iris have something like that?

I need to check recorded footage probably once a fortnight, and it's pretty helpful being able to scan through multiple recordings at the same time

so I can select tea room camera, office camera, yard camera, and then skim through all 3 videos at the same time with just one slider

can blue iris do something like that ?

(sorry for the rookie questions, I'm googling but it's not helping much)



(EDIT: when I remotely view it's on lan)

 

[Q™]

If you're going to run Blue Iris you're going to need an recent i5 or (preferably) an i7 CPU; anything else will be a waste of your money. Blue Iris can do everything you want, and even things which you can't yet imagine. But good Blue Iris performance starts with a decent i5 or (preferably) an i7 CPU.

 

[bp2008]

If you must have a server chip, make certain it supports Quick Sync Video because that is what Blue Iris uses for hardware acceleration. Trust me, it is worth more than extra cores.

Blue Iris doesn't have a fully featured client program that you can use remotely. For full features (including the ability to view multiple recordings at once efficiently), you need to be at the Blue Iris PC or connected to it via some type of remote desktop. If a limited feature set is sufficient, there is always the official Android or IOS client apps or my "UI2" web page which you can get from the link in my signature below.

 

[Q™]

... or my "UI2" web page which you can get from the link in my signature below.

Bp2008's ui2 web page is a must-have for Blue Iris. It is truly a teriffic piece of work.

 

[knighty]

I'll get an i7 then

and see if I can get a decent raid card... don't really want to run raid, don't need the extra speed and don't want the reduced reliability but need a nice/easy way to spread footage across drives

(to be fair before SSDs came out I always ran raid and never had a single problem/failure with it)

still tempted by freenas (or similar) so I can run JABOD but I get what you're saying about speed loss


guess with dual onboard nic I could dedicate one to direct connection to the freenas box and that might help a bit ?

 

[Masejoer]

and see if I can get a decent raid card... don't really want to run raid, don't need the extra speed and don't want the reduced reliability but need a nice/easy way to spread footage across drives

Under Windows, you can use spanned volumes or Storage Spaces. Both options give you the capability of using multiple drives as one volume. For spanned, I'd recommending running it on top of RAID1/5/6 for redundancy. For Storage Spaces, you can get 1-disk-failure redundancy without needing a RAID controller, or Intel's software RAID. It behaves like spanned RAID5, but you also get performance benefits depending on the number of columns it is setup with.

I would never RAID0, and I haven't been happy with recovery testing results with RAID5 and RAID6, nor random writes.

 

[knighty]

if I log into each of the IP cams, and get them to send recorded footage to ftp server or nas....

do you know how easy it is to review that footage later on ?

is it possible to watch multiple cameras recordings at the same time ?
(so that 3 or 4 old videos play in time sync)

 

[Masejoer]

if I log into each of the IP cams, and get them to send recorded footage to ftp server or nas....

do you know how easy it is to review that footage later on ?

is it possible to watch multiple cameras recordings at the same time ?
(so that 3 or 4 old videos play in time sync)

There would be four different video files and streams. You'd probably want to have the times set exactly the same on each camera, timestamp watermarks enabled, open up four files in different video player instances, then click "play" on each as each one passes some timestamp. First video play at 05:02.00, set second video to 05:02.05 and click play on second video when first reaches the 5-second mark, and so on. If you want everything matched up, you really need to use a central system - anything else will be a course on aggravation.

 

[knighty]

damn, I kind of had my fingers crossed I could get the cameras to dump to a server and then the server could be a dumb/simple system, just with lots of storage

I've got a couple of dahua cameras, and the quality is bloody amasing!

pss software seams good so far, but I've only tested the cameras out, not done any recording past 5 min test


thanks for the help

 

[Masejoer]

The benefits of Blue Iris, for me, greatly outweigh its drawbacks. $160 i7 3770 system, around 50W power usage with 16MP of cameras at 20fps (9 more cameras totaling 23MP coming once I mount them and put connectors on my already-run cat6). It's just one more input I feed into my ever-evolving home-automation and security system.

A nas + hard drives may consume 10-30W. NAS or NVR power savings over running a blue-iris setup may only be 30% cheaper overall, and you lose all the benefits of a highly-customizable server application.