Upgrade hardware or software first?

Boyturtle

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I currently have 6 X 5mp cameras running on BI (still on v4) on a Win 10VM hosted on Unraid. The processor is Intel Xeon E3-1230v5 and 4 of the available 8 threads are currently allocated to BI. This processor does not offer Quick Sync, and even if it did, the (Supermicro) motherboard doesn't support this feature.
Initially, all 8 threads were needed by BI, but this left little processing power for other activities. I took the plunge and installed an Nvidia P2000 and passed that through to the BI VM. At the same time, I made some other tweaks to the system (direct to disk, lowered the FPS, set the overlays on the camera) and this lowered the demands on the processor to my current state.
I'm now at a crossroads and would like upgrade my hardware due to further demands on the server in other areas. I had been looking at upping the core/threads count and was considering going down the AMD Ryzen route. On further investigation, I decided to leave the server as is and move the BI install on to a bare metal Win 10 unit running an i7-6700 with 16GB of RAM. This frees up my server processing resources (and removing my need/running cost for the P2000) and allows me to be more efficient by using Quick Sync.
My new PC arrives next week and would like to upgrade to BI v.5 as part of that process, while I’m still in the mood to make changes. My plan is to use a sub stream and H.265 (both options not available to me currently) and somewhere down the line use AI for more efficient triggering.
Would I be better to upgrade to v.5 now on the VM and then move the licenses and configs across to the new machine next week, or would I be better to move the license and configs across first and do the BI upgrading to v.5 afterwards?
 

bp2008

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Consider not even transferring the configuration, and just starting fresh with v5 on the new machine. Several settings are lost in the transition from v4 to v5, and motion overlays and are lost when you enable sub streams, plus your BI registry will be full of bloat because Blue Iris doesn't clean up after itself. Seriously, if I open regedit and export the "Blue Iris" folder, it is 245 megabytes because mine has been accumulating crud since version 3.x. Point is, you'll need to revisit every setting anyway, so you might as well start from a clean slate. That's my opinion.

The way the licensing works, you "upgrade" your Blue Iris 4 key to a Blue Iris 5 key by applying a year of extended support. So you should upgrade the VM first, then deactivate via the button in Blue Iris options before you activate on the new machine. When you put in the key on the new machine, it will be the same product key you used for V4.

Of course you could also just buy a brand new BI5 license but that is more expensive.
 

sebastiantombs

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I'd say don't move anything and install V5.X on the new machine. If you're going to use substreams on the new box you will need to reconfigure motion detection anyway since motion detection occurs in the substream and not the mainstream as in V4. In terms of the license issues, bp2008 is on the money.
 
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