Second home set up in Blue Iris

[Glassdome]

Hi all, I have been a long term fan of Blue Iris and used the app for the last 7 or 8 years. I have a use case where I would like to add cameras at a second property to my existing set up. Initially I had thought about a second pc and licence for blue iris, but that would mean having to log out and in, what I would love to do is have it all in one instance. Has anyone set this up and is it easy and safe to do - ie. use the external address for the second property? Thanks in advance

 

[biggen]

Hi all, I have been a long term fan of Blue Iris and used the app for the last 7 or 8 years. I have a use case where I would like to add cameras at a second property to my existing set up. Initially I had thought about a second pc and licence for blue iris, but that would mean having to log out and in, what I would love to do is have it all in one instance. Has anyone set this up and is it easy and safe to do - ie. use the external address for the second property? Thanks in advance

I don’t understand your question. You will have to have another license of BI to use it concurrently at two locations.

Are you asking about hosting one BI instance at your home (or cloud) and then having all cameras from both locations connect back to a single instance? That’s a bad idea. If either location looses internet then you also lose camera recording ability for the duration of the outage.

 

[Glassdome]

Hi yes the latter. One pc and blue iris licence at one location with the cameras from the second location on the same device. I’ve 5g backup and a power supply at the main location so resilience is pretty good - one of the reasons for going down this route

 

[biggen]

Hi yes the latter. One pc and blue iris licence at one location with the cameras from the second location on the same device. I’ve 5g backup and a power supply at the main location so resilience is pretty good - one of the reasons for going down this route

It can be done. I’d VPN the two routers together so you don’t have to use port forwarding. Then you’d want secondary backup internet at both locations (especially the one hosting the BI server). So long as you have enough upstream bandwidth at the location that is sending to the remote BI instance it will work.

 

[Glassdome]

The second location has gigabit broadband so should be okay. I’ve done port forwarding but I’m new to vpn connecting routers between locations. Is this straightforward? Do you know of any guides or software that works to enable it? Sorry to ask newbie questions

 

[biggen]

The second location has gigabit broadband so should be okay. I’ve done port forwarding but I’m new to vpn connecting routers between locations. Is this straightforward? Do you know of any guides or software that works to enable it? Sorry to ask newbie questions

It will depend on if your router supports it. It’s called site-to-site VPN. I use Peplink routers in three locations and have all three of them running in a site-to-site VPN so I can access all of them from any of the three locations.

Do a search on site to site vpn for your specific brand router.

 

[The Automation Guy]

I have a site to site VPN between my house and my parents house. I have a camera at my parents house that I monitor on my home BI setup. It works just fine if your internet speeds are capable of supporting all the data you expect to be sending from the second home to your primary house. You'll especially need to pay attention to the "upload" speeds at your second home. While getting service with the same upload/download speeds is becoming more common in the US, there are still plenty of service providers that have healthy download speeds, but terrible upload speeds.

I will strongly suggest that if you care about or "need" this footage at all, that you set up a BI system at the second home. This will not prevent you from viewing the camera at your primary residence, but I would never rely on the VPN/internet connection to be the primary source of footage. Even if you still want to record the footage at your primary house to be able to make it easier to look back at alerts etc, I would still want to have my primary recordings be done "onsite" at the second home to ensure they were always recorded even if the internet went down.

 

[biggen]

I have a site to site VPN between my house and my parents house. I have a camera at my parents house that I monitor on my home BI setup. It works just fine if your internet speeds are capable of supporting all the data you expect to be sending from the second home to your primary house. You'll especially need to pay attention to the "upload" speeds at your second home. While getting service with the same upload/download speeds is becoming more common in the US, there are still plenty of service providers that have healthy download speeds, but terrible upload speeds.

I will strongly suggest that if you care about or "need" this footage at all, that you set up a BI system at the second home. This will not prevent you from viewing the camera at your primary residence, but I would never rely on the VPN/internet connection to be the primary source of footage. Even if you still want to record the footage at your primary house to be able to make it easier to look back at alerts etc, I would still want to have my primary recordings be done "onsite" at the second home to ensure they were always recorded even if the internet went down.

This. All three of my sites that I have connected with site-to-site VPNs I have BI installations at all three. One of them I use a NUC with a Samsung 4TB SSD in it. Been going strong for a couple years now. Runs nice and cool and dead quiet.

 

[quiet.tea]

Recording directly to another location just adds two more points of failure. If either location loses Internet connectivity, the recordings will be lost.

 

[looney2ns]

I do this with a family member, I recommend like the others, setup a 2nd computer and Blue Iris instance at the remote house.
Then, you can use either your copy of Blue Iris to connect to the 2nd home, and make any and all adjustments to the remote system.
Or you can easily view the remote cameras by using UI3, which is builtin to Blue Iris.

 

[ludshed]

What everyone else said.

I do that on big same site installs where fiber or long range wireless are used

 

[Glassdome]

Fab - sincere thanks all. I think I have come down to two options:

1. Use Tailscale and see if I can set up a site to site VPN. Use BI on the main site with a PC, link the second site and tie the cameras in to site 1 VPN
2. Set up BI on separate PCs at each site - but this would mean switching between servers which is not exactly what I would like to do as ideally I would have all cameras in one instance

Not sure how easy 1 is or whether upstream bandwidth makes this impractical?

On 2 - is there a way to link all into a single BI instance and see the cameras on one pane?

Sorry for the newbie and non-tech nature of this. Whilst I am super comfortable with BI and camera set ups, I don't have any experience between multiple sites or utilising external camera addresses in BI

 

[TonyR]

My suggestion:

1) Set up site-to-site VPN between your place and the remote.
2) Install another BI server at remote site.
3) Assuming good upload speed at remote site with no data cap, stream the chosen cameras from remote site to your local site using "Raw H.264" stream from BI as per the below link I posted in April of 2018:

Show cam stream from a Remote BI server on a Local BI server

If you have access to a Remote BI server and would like to display one or more cams on your Local BI server, this works. I am not promoting port forwarding here so make your own accommodation for VPN. Create a new cam on Local BI server as follows: http: = "Remote-BI-Server WAN IP or DDNS...

ipcamtalk.com

It will appear as one of your local cameras and you can set up motion detection and alerts like it was at your place.

EDIT, 5/7/24 @ 0630 CDT: The BI screenshot in the above link is 6 years old; since then the name for the "Camera make" drop-down has changed and is no longer just "Generic", it is now "Generic/ONVIF."