Some evaluation questions

[Matts]

Hi community,

I've installed my first security camera yesterday and naturally I've been researching quite some internet pages as to what recorder to use. I installed the BI5 evaluation yesterday and I've got some random questions I can't really find an answer to or need someone to confirm if possible.

Some background info:
- I am using home assistant and eventually looking for integration (not my first concern).
- From the home assistant community everyone recommends BI.
- Futuristic is my thing, my house is close to fully autonomous using latest and experimental tech level hardware and software.

What I have now for testing:
A single Dahua 4K/12MP 360degree IP camera (IPC-EBW81230) running H.265 + audio
My server running:
- Windows Server 2019 Datacenter
- 2x Xeon E5-2630L (12 physical cores / 24 logical)
- 200GB memory
- SSD RAID 10 set, 2100 MByte/s read and 1000MByte/s write measured speeds (~1TB space)
- SAS RAID 5 set + Intel DC cache SSD, short term 600+MByte/s read/write, continuous around 200MByte/s (18TB space, cache disk is 120GB)
- Dual 10Gbit/s SFP+ fiber network

Right so I am just testing with one camera now and I get some results I didn't expect.

1. BI doesn't seem to do "enough" to work through the buffer of the single camera. My FPS comes in at 5 to 10 FPS looking at the information window. Why do I mention buffer? When the camera buffer was at 10M it just stopped receiving network traffic from the camera after a few seconds. Increasing this to 40M will keep the camera stream coming for much longer but cut out eventually anyway.

So right now it's not even possible for me to get a single camera running the way it should. Hardware is not stressing at all and is using 10% CPU, 1.5GB MEM. What's going on here?

2. BI seems to be de/re-coding the stream, what can I do to prevent this? I don't have any overlays set.

3. Direct to Disk, the first thing I read was to enable save directly to disk, but I don't notice any difference in performance disabling, enabling or disabling recording all together. Is it correct that during evaluation this option doesn't work as intended?


Now some questions not related to performance:
4. How can I zoom in to certain parts of the 360 degree view? Right now I just get the circle or some split view. The split view is not really what I'm looking for as it seems to keep the quality of the zoomed out 360 view instead of actually getting the raw data and being able to see all details clearly. The camera is 4000x3000 pixels and gives crystal clear output.

5. How can I select multiple views from the 360degree view to record independently or somehow link so it's viewable in a specific view configuration?

6. I can't seem to find a privacy mask, is that still a non-existent feature? I have 5 windows/doors from neighbors in different places of the camera view that need to be covered and never recorded


Those are my main concerns for now.
Please if I'm asking a question that's been asked a million times and I missed it feel free to link it.
If you require more info from my side please let me know.

 

[Cinnman]

Wow! Now I'm jealous---that is a beast of a system (wait, is this the NSA?). Wish I possessed the knowledge to help, but it's over my pay grade.

I would however recommend that you contact blue iris help first. Takes a day to get reply (and not sure about trial copy response) but they are very knowledgeable and when I had an issue, they worked really well for me. I would suspect it is something to do with the interface of a 360 camera or such a large data stream with blue iris and may be camera specific since many people seem to have many cameras running simultaneous with no problem with much less capable hardware, but just guessing. Good luck.

 

[looney2ns]

Have you studied this>> Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk
and this>> Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Privacy mask would be a feature of the camera, not BI.
Read the help file on Dewarp.
Does your processor support Hardware acceleration for video?

 

[Cinnman]

also just read in the "choosing hardware section" of this website and noted area in bold might be applicable to your situation---

Server CPUs (Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, etc) and Multiple Sockets(top)


Generally speaking, if you can appreciate (and afford) an enterprise-grade server platform, your needs will be better met by enterprise-grade video management software instead of Blue Iris.

That said, here is some guidance. If your needs would be met by an i5 or i7 CPU, but you want ECC memory or some other feature only found on server platforms, consider a similarly priced and specced Xeon E (or older: E3) series model that has Quick Sync Video so you can take advantage of efficient hardware accelerated H.264 decoding. Otherwise, look at general CPU benchmarks and use those to decide what the best CPU is for your money.

Beware of old used servers claiming lots of cores and memory at low prices (sure as sin, not your equipment). These will be loud and inefficient by today's standards, and in many cases outperformed by a cheaper workstation that is years newer. Also note that Blue Iris is not optimized for multiple-socket servers. If you are considering running such a heavy load that Blue Iris would be unable to handle it with a single CPU, then you should be using different software.

 

[SouthernYankee]

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Bi should be run a standalone computer.
The xeon does not support quick sync
Do not use RAID for video storage.
If doing motion detection in BI, or doing overlays like the time, it will decode the stream.

1)Provide a complete network diagram.
2) do not run a virus protection on the BI folder or network connection.
3) do not run the camera connect through the router to get to the BI machine.
4) are you running the demo version or the paid for version ?

Read,study,plan before spending money ..... plan plan plan
Test do not guess
-----------------------------
My standard welcome to the forum message.

Please read the cliff notes and other items in the wiki. The wiki is in the blue bar at the top of the page.

Read How to Secure Your Network (Don't Get Hacked!) | IP Cam Talk in the wiki also.

Quick start
1) Use Dahua starlight cameras or Hikvision darkfighter cameras or ICPT Night eye cameras (https://store.ipcamtalk.com/) if you need good low light cameras.
2) use a VPN to access home network (openVPN)
3) Do not use wifi cameras.
4) Do not use cloud storage
5) Do Not use uPNP, P2P, QR, do not open ports,
6) More megapixel is not necessarily better.
7) Avoid chinese hacked cameras (most ebay, amazon, aliexpress cameras(not all, but most))
8) Do not use reolink, ring, nest cameras (they are junk)
9) If possible use a turret camera , bullet collect spiders, dome collect dirt and reflect light (IR)
10) Use only solid copper, AWG 23 or 24 ethernet wire. , no CCA (Copper Clad Aluminum)
11) use a test mount to verify the camera mount location. My test rig: rev.2
12) (Looney2ns)If you want to be able to ID faces, don't mount cams higher than 8ft. You want to know who did it, not just what happened.
13) Use a router that has openVPN built in (Most ASUS, Some NetGear....)
14) camera placement use the calculator... IPVM Camera Calculator V3

Cameras to look at
IPC-HDW2231R-ZS Review-Dahua IPC-HDW2231RP-ZS Starlight Camera-Varifocal
IPC-HDW5231-ZE Review-Dahua Starlight IPC-HDW5231R-ZE 800 meter capable ePOE
IPC-HFW4239T-ASE IPC-HFW4239T-ASE
IPC-T5442TM-AS Review IPC-T5442TM-AS-LED (Full Color, Starlight+)
IPCT-HDW5431RE-I Review - IP Cam Talk 4 MP IR Fixed Turret Network Camera
DS-2CD2325FWD-I
IPC-T5442TM-AS https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/review-oem-4mp-ai-cam-ipc-t5442tm-as-starlight.39203/ - 4MP starlight+

My preferred indoor cameras
DS-2CD2442FWD-IW
IPC-K35A https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/review-dahua-ipc-k35a-3mp-cube-camera.37581/#post-373517

Read,study,plan before spending money ..... plan plan plan
Test do not guess

 

[Matts]

Wow! Now I'm jealous---that is a beast of a system (wait, is this the NSA?). Wish I possessed the knowledge to help, but it's over my pay grade.

I would however recommend that you contact blue iris help first. .... Good luck.

That's a good tip, I'will try to send them an e-mail too!
Also, I'm lucky to work with server and enterprise hardware as a specialist in VMware NSX, this server is just a small one compared to the stuff I work with and to be honest, it's all the same just with extra space and compute power. There will always be a new limit, yet I can do everything I want for labs on any 32GB server really!

Have you studied this>> Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk
and this>> Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Privacy mask would be a feature of the camera, not BI.
Read the help file on Dewarp.
Does your processor support Hardware acceleration for video?

Hi, this is just my test machine, it does not support GPU acceleration. The CPU I'm using is easily capable of running a few camera's, the problem I have however is that it's doing something but not much. Resource usage is minimal too! I actually did read the links, I also notice the hardware acceleration is for H.264, I'm using H.265 so it's not going to help me anyway.

-----------------------------
Bi should be run a standalone computer.
The xeon does not support quick sync
Do not use RAID for video storage.
If doing motion detection in BI, or doing overlays like the time, it will decode the stream.
<snip>

Hi, thanks for the welcome.
This is just a test machine to see if BI works and has all options I'd like.
I'm not doing any overlays and my compute resources are not even remotely used, hence my question why I can't even get a single camera to work.
All I know is that hardware isn't the problem, even if horribly inefficient (which it really isn't) this CPU on 12 logical threads should be able to run at least a camera stream per thread easily.

Thanks for the tips and help!
I was trying to avoid the whole hardware thing by stating what I have is far more than ever needed so we could skip that part. Apart from quick sync making H.264 a bit harder (which I'm not using anyway), all other hardware configuration will outperform most enterprise grade NVR's out there. I am aware running this system in production is complete overkill and not efficient, that's why I'm just testing with it because I had one available.

 

[Matts]

also just read in the "choosing hardware section" of this website and noted area in bold might be applicable to your situation---

Also note that Blue Iris is not optimized for multiple-socket servers. If you are considering running such a heavy load that Blue Iris would be unable to handle it with a single CPU, then you should be using different software.

Yeah, I read that one, shouldn't be a problem as I can disable the second socket if I were to get to that amount of CPU load, but I'm not even getting a single thread filled up at the moment.
So won't run into problems during my test with 1 camera!

 

[looney2ns]

Yeah, if you have any antivirus running be sure to exclude all Bi folders in av.