Yes it can send sms messages. It can send push notifications if you buy the mobile app.
What is a decent IP cam for my budget?
- Thread starter rwsstudios
- Start date
Yes it can send sms messages. It can send push notifications if you buy the mobile app.
iwanttosee
Pulling my weight
Other than you, nobody knows what "my camera" is.
List the make and model of "my camera" if you're looking for help.
sebastiantombs
Known around here
My BI machine, converted from being my original desktop/server, has been running, 24/7/365, non-stop for about ten years. Fan failures, sure, but with six fans running losing one isn't a problem.
BI can send SMS, push, and email, or any combination thereof, for any trigger you configure to do so.
BI can send SMS, push, and email, or any combination thereof, for any trigger you configure to do so.
Well thanks for that - it's news to me about the ability of pc's to run 24/7/52.
I've lost two Asus motherboards due to fan failure - onboard fans they were. To be fair the Asus software notified me they were on the way out and I didn't react quick enough. And I've had another two at least with CPU fans give up. One I caught and replaced when it was rattling ferociously. The other cooked the cpu. I realise it shouldn't have happened probably, the system should have told me but it did.
Perhaps my computers typically going on and off every day imposes extra strains on fans and that's why I get such bad results.
And you mention keeping your gear well maintained. I got to admit I do quite the opposite. Usually my pc's have the cases open, guts half spilling out and fans coated in dust the way they do. I blow them out from time to time when it gets too bad is all.
And another poster here I see claims his pc's have been running non stop for 10 years, too (fantastic, that's more up time than we got with my beloved DEC mini in the old days ) but he quotes it didn't matter because he had six fans on it !
Well that's not your normal pc. Certainly not mine.
Then there's perhaps cost. Does a pc use appreciably more electricity than a simple dedicated video recorder? I don't know.
And lastly there's the Hard Drives. Are the hard drives in a dedicated recorder any better, more robust than in a pc?
If those thing check out okay:
cost the same
hard drives as robust
stock standard fans will persist if not on and off every day
I sure would be happy to move onto a pc platform. Just one niggling doubt. Always ran the Dahua's from the NVR. I'm not sure if they can be seen by Contacam/Ispy. They're a bit proprietary those Dahua's I feel. I really don't like proprietary if I can avoid it. Open Source all the way if I can get it.
sebastiantombs
Known around here
A PC, built to be run 24/7/365 will consume no more power than an NVR. Remember, an NVR is nothing more than a dumbed down computer in the first place. They usually are running Linux, in some form, for an operating system.
The drives in a PC can be exactly the same as the drives in an NVR. They should be surveillance rated drives to begin with. Those drives are rated for continuous duty unlike the drives in a run of the mill PC that are accessed relatively infrequently.
The reason you can't see your cameras that connect to your NVR is that there are two networks involved with the NVR. One is the local LAN that you access the NVR from. The other is a "private" network using a totally different IP address scheme. There is nothing "proprietary" about Dahua cameras. I have a second NIC in the Blue Iris PC and it has a totally different network scheme deliberately. This keeps the video traffic off of my regular LAN network, IE congestion, and it keeps the cameras isolated from the internet since Windows does not route traffic between the two networks. Like you, I can only access my cameras directly from the Blue Iris PC, my NVR.
In fact electronics that are power cycled have a higher chance of failure than devices that are left powered on. There's a lot of factors involved in that, but after 30 years of experience with desktops and servers, it seems to be a truism to me.
In terms of cost, a PC can easily match the cost of an equivalent NVR. Note I say "equivalent". A PC running Blue Iris is not locked in to using the same brand of camera. It will easily support anything from Dahua/Hikvision/Axis to Foscam, Reolink or what have you. In terms of flexibility with motion detection, alerts and artificial intelligence it's pretty hard to beat, especially considering the price. You do need an appropriate PoE switch to power the cameras and that can make it a little more expensive overall. Many people use a reconditioned business class machine quite successfully and they will run 24/7/365 for years on end as well.
As far as "open source", if you're comfortable with a publicly available code base to run your surveillance system including the cameras, more power to you.
You really should read all the material in the Wiki, in the blue bar at the top of the page. It covers every aspect of setting up a system, NVR or Blue Iris, and will fill in a lot of gaps for you.
The drives in a PC can be exactly the same as the drives in an NVR. They should be surveillance rated drives to begin with. Those drives are rated for continuous duty unlike the drives in a run of the mill PC that are accessed relatively infrequently.
The reason you can't see your cameras that connect to your NVR is that there are two networks involved with the NVR. One is the local LAN that you access the NVR from. The other is a "private" network using a totally different IP address scheme. There is nothing "proprietary" about Dahua cameras. I have a second NIC in the Blue Iris PC and it has a totally different network scheme deliberately. This keeps the video traffic off of my regular LAN network, IE congestion, and it keeps the cameras isolated from the internet since Windows does not route traffic between the two networks. Like you, I can only access my cameras directly from the Blue Iris PC, my NVR.
In fact electronics that are power cycled have a higher chance of failure than devices that are left powered on. There's a lot of factors involved in that, but after 30 years of experience with desktops and servers, it seems to be a truism to me.
In terms of cost, a PC can easily match the cost of an equivalent NVR. Note I say "equivalent". A PC running Blue Iris is not locked in to using the same brand of camera. It will easily support anything from Dahua/Hikvision/Axis to Foscam, Reolink or what have you. In terms of flexibility with motion detection, alerts and artificial intelligence it's pretty hard to beat, especially considering the price. You do need an appropriate PoE switch to power the cameras and that can make it a little more expensive overall. Many people use a reconditioned business class machine quite successfully and they will run 24/7/365 for years on end as well.
As far as "open source", if you're comfortable with a publicly available code base to run your surveillance system including the cameras, more power to you.
You really should read all the material in the Wiki, in the blue bar at the top of the page. It covers every aspect of setting up a system, NVR or Blue Iris, and will fill in a lot of gaps for you.
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Yep. thanks for all that. 
p.s. So what would you advocate - a system centred on a pc or a system centred on an NVR?
p.s. So what would you advocate - a system centred on a pc or a system centred on an NVR?
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Not sure if it was mentioned already but be sure to use both streams for your cameras in BI. Typically your cameras have two. Set the sub stream for 15FPS and the main stream for 20-30 or whatever the form suggests... (works for me but I'm sure some senior members will curb-slam me on that shortly with better answers) . There are some clever tricks to cloning cameras and using motion sensing on clones to lower your machine's CPU usage. Also set your recordings to be "direct-to-disc" and your format to BVR. I don't think I ever found a "best practices" or "tricks" synopsis for using BI but that would have helped me when I was a noob.
My BI computer is a desktop Franken-box with an I7-7700@3.6GHz, 16GB Ram, Winders 10 Pro, 64 bit. One SSD and one SATA drive. I ftp everything off to a local Synology. I typically run 15 IP cameras with my CPU hovering around 20-25%, Memory around 36%. I also run pfSense on a $200 refurb desktop and block EVERY camera from the interweb. When I look in my outbound firewall logs it makes me shake my head how often my cameras (Hik, NSC, Amcrest, and Foscam) try to do DNS lookups and phone home to IP's that resolve to China. I also recently cut the cord on BI and block it from the internet, too, and only access it through my VPN (pfSense).
Regarding a previous comment about cameras that shutdow or misbehave if their internet access is cut off, the only device I have seen do that was a Caseta/Lutron light switch hub. It could not reach the mothership's NTP server so it quit turning things on/off when scheduled. I surfed their forum and contacted support but in the end I had to give up and put the device on an IOT wifi network with full interweb access and just let the chips fall where they may.
My BI computer is a desktop Franken-box with an I7-7700@3.6GHz, 16GB Ram, Winders 10 Pro, 64 bit. One SSD and one SATA drive. I ftp everything off to a local Synology. I typically run 15 IP cameras with my CPU hovering around 20-25%, Memory around 36%. I also run pfSense on a $200 refurb desktop and block EVERY camera from the interweb. When I look in my outbound firewall logs it makes me shake my head how often my cameras (Hik, NSC, Amcrest, and Foscam) try to do DNS lookups and phone home to IP's that resolve to China. I also recently cut the cord on BI and block it from the internet, too, and only access it through my VPN (pfSense).
Regarding a previous comment about cameras that shutdow or misbehave if their internet access is cut off, the only device I have seen do that was a Caseta/Lutron light switch hub. It could not reach the mothership's NTP server so it quit turning things on/off when scheduled. I surfed their forum and contacted support but in the end I had to give up and put the device on an IOT wifi network with full interweb access and just let the chips fall where they may.
Sorry, forgot to mut my 2 cents in on the PC vs. NVR. Sooner or later that NVR is going end of life, or a part will fail that cannot be replaced due to age, or its software will no longer be supported on that hardware then you're looking at a forklift replacement. BI has lasted me through 2 desktop PC's that can have drive swaps, memory swaps, power supplies replaced, and keep moving up just by backing up a config file. And I think the current BI software support renewal is only about $60/year. Plus BI now has options to jump forward or backward on versions at your convenience.
And another thing ... If you can't connect your cameras with ethernet, and before you go to wifi, you might consider Powerline Adapters ...
sebastiantombs
Known around here
Thanks sebastiantombs. You learn something new every day ... unless you're careful
looney2ns
IPCT Contributor