Blue Iris with Hikvision cameras - Q&A part 1

[Western]

I have a small configuration of Hikvision cameras and a laptop running Blue Iris to monitor a rural property. There’s been a lot of trial and error along the way, and I’m continuing to try and improve things as I learn more about the various components of the system. Here’s what I’ve got and what I’ve learned along the way, along with some questions. Looking forward to comments and suggestions from the community.

Cameras (all are "US" cameras / firmware, purchased from B&H, updated firmware from US site, not CH):

1. HIKVISION DS-2CD2T85G1-I5 (firmware V5.6.6 build 210625)

2. HIKVISION DS-2CD2087G2-L (firmware V5.5.800 build 211009)

3. HIKVISION PCI-LB18F2S (firmware V5.7.1 build 220607)

Cameras 1 and 2 cover the same scene, from somewhat different angles. Camera 1 is a DarkFighter type, with infrared, and so it provides a good color image in the daylight, and at night b&w via its infrared beam which has a pretty long and wide reach.

Camera 2 is a Colorvu type, which has a daylight color (ie visible) LED, with various options for light on. It really doesn’t provide a lot of light, and is annoying to have turned on all the time. I have it set to turn on in the event of motion detection, and which is kind of useful during daylight hours since it is visible and lets people know that they have been detected by the camera. There is no ambient light in the area being monitored, and so this camera is pretty much useless for night monitoring. I do have this same type of camera in a city location elsewhere where there is good ambient night light from street lights etc, and it works pretty well for 7x24 for monitoring in that environment.

Camera 3 is another model of Darkfighter type, very similar to Camera 1.

All three cameras are 8M sensors, set to 3840 x 2160 resolution, H265 (NOT 265+), 10 FPS, I frame interval of 10, variable bit rate (VBR). The cameras feed to the most current update of Blue Iris. Blue Iris Inspect shows them as generic ONVIF cameras. I have the “Get ONVIF Events” selected on the camera configuration page. To get that to work ok, I had to go into the cameras Configuration > Advanced Settings > Integration Protocol page to select Enable ONVIF, and then to add a user account on that same page, using the same user and password as the main password used for the camera login, and which is in the Blue Iris camera settings config page.

The free public domain utility ONVIF Device Manager was a helpful tool for checking out the ONVIF features and operation of the cameras.

This setup works pretty well for monitoring and playback. I have Blue Iris currently set for continuous recording (hires main stream). This requires about 4-6 GB of storage per camera per hour during daylight hours. At night the Darkfighter cameras require about the same amount of space as in the day, but the Colorvu picture is pretty much solid black, and so requires a lot less space, maybe 150 MB per hour.

I have the cameras set in their Configuration > Video/Audio > Display Info on Stream to Enable Dual VCA. I would have thought that this would have resulted in the Hikvision camera generated dynamic real-time green motion tracking boxes being added to the video stream from the cameras and showing up on the Blue Iris displays and recordings, but for some reasons they do not. Any ideas?

I’m going to leave discussions of motion detection, triggers, alerts, AI etc for a separate note.

Comments / questions welcomed!

[mpoczynek]

I have no idea. But I do know that in the past Hikvision support has been wonderful. May be worth an e-mail.