Dual monitors?

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Thixotropic
Posts: 743
Joined: Wed Sep 04, 2019 7:20 pm
Location: Low-Earth Orbit

Dual monitors?

Post by Thixotropic »

Anyone using dual monitors or a wide screen monitor for BI? Does BI support intelligent handling of dual monitors?

I have some extra monitors around the house and I'm thinking of adding one to my BI setup as I'm running out of space on the one monitor attached to my BI box.

Alternatively, I'm thinking of getting a 34" monitor to see if it would make a good monitor for BI, something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/LG-34WK650-W-34- ... 078GSH1LV/

I have two very wide angle cams plus a bunch of regular cams (8 cameras total at the moment) and I want to add a couple more, but my monitor is 100% filled as it is, adding more cams would just make everything smaller. Not sure if this is a solution or not, but I think it could be.
Blue Iris 5.x x64 | Windows 10 Pro x64 | 16GB RAM | i7-7700 3.6 GHz | 1TB HDD | 2TB RAID NAS | 9 Cameras | Almost Dual NIC | 2KVA UPS
MikeBwca
Posts: 1115
Joined: Thu Jun 20, 2019 5:39 am

Re: Dual monitors?

Post by MikeBwca »

Well, the larger the monitor... the more you'll be able to fit.

I have 4 26" monitors. BI will fit full screen only on 1 monitor.

You could drag the BI console across monitors. But, some cameras will be split across monitors.

What I do is to use 'Open in desktop frame' to position a set of cameras on another monitor. Unfortunately, this applied to ALL groups.
Ken recently changed this to be set the 'Open in Desktop frame' per Group. This works well, and I use it.
One issue is that the original group will need to have it's 'open in desktop frame' unchecked (un-poped).

1. In you main group, go into the group layout editor and copy to a new group name. Never use your original group. You can always rename & delete groups.
2. In the new group, choose the cameras you want on another monitor and pop them out by selecting 'Open in desktop frame' for each camera.
3. Move & resize the desktop frame of popped out cameras to another monitor.
4. exit group layout editor.
5. switch back to the original group. You may see the same or a portion of the cameras in a desktop frame. If you do, enter the group layout editor and pop them back in & exit the editor. Switch groups should now remember correctly and pop-out only on the new group. I'm sure this will be corrected in a future update.

I had requested this a week or so ago (perhaps others have too). Nice to see it implemented. It's very handy. I can now keep n eye on cameras when I have a camera maximized for reviewing alerts.

I may also suggest having multiple desktop frames per group, so that we can do this on multiple monitors!

A few notes:
- the desktop frame size and position is not remembered by group, but common to all groups! Also, sometimes the desktop frame will change position between views.
- If you switch from a group that has cameras in a desktop frame, then to another group that does not have some/all of the cameras in the desktop frame, the desktop frame remains even though the group you switched too does not have those cameras.
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