May want to leave Synology

[Tdot]

Back storry, I have a NVR that is crapping out on me and keeps rebooting and losing connection to the cameras. So I realized my synology has this surveillance package and I've been using it on two powered cameras until my injector came to plug the POE cameras in. To my surprise Synology wants $350 more dollars to hook up the rest of my cameras to the surveillance station!!! WTF!!! So I'm here looking at Blue Iris.

My issue now is, I was concerned about spending another $350 for the license, but I'm going to have to end up spending that and more to buy a computer for B.I. So why do it, why shouldn't I just stick with Surveylance Station?

Can someone with experience with both please chime in and point me in the right direction? One thing I really like (I may not be remembering correctly) but I didn't have to do any port forwarding with my synology to open it up for remote access.

Thanks for any help.

[smalljob]

I don’t have experience with Synology and actually only minimal with BI, I was in similar situation and came very very close to purchasing a Synology solution. It looks like a nice solution. I happened to have a n i5 Windows PCs hanging around that I decided to repurpose as a BI server.

I am running 4 Poe cameras into the NVR , one into a POE switch and one WiFi. The one on the switch and the WiFi stored their data in different places. Convoluted at best

I have had issues with remote access using the native solution provided by my NVR and camera vendor so I was enticed by the reading I had done on Synology.

30 minutes before heading out the door for thanksgiving I started the remote wizard in BI to configure remote access. Very intuitive. Left the house and at my friends I asked to use her PC. I typed in my wan ip and port with login and I was in. Very surprised after previous attempts with other surveillance software.

So can’t I say dump Synology but I can say don’t worry about setting up BI for remote access.

I am really impressed with all aspects of BI so far. They do recommend an I7 processor but so far my I 5 is ok.


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[ctfjr]

fwiw. . . I also started using my Synology for my 1st 2 cameras. Eventually I started using BI on my desktop - concurrently with Surveillance Station. When I added 2 additional cameras (and am about to add 3 more) I pretty much committed to BI. I just turned off Surveillance Station yesterday.
I found BI to be a more robust software package and it meets my needs just fine. My desktop is a 2950X Theadripper that I never turn off. I still use the Synology for my long term storage solution allocating about 20tb now for BI.

[Ed55]

I have no experience at all with Synology but have been using BlueIris 4 for several years.
I have 21 cameras (all Foscam, a mix of different models), connected to a BlueIris 4 server.
3 Of the cameras are wired, the rest are on WiFi. The server is a Dell Precision T3500 with a X5675 6 core Xeon CPU, 16 GB of RAM, a 240 GB SSD as system drive and a 2 TB WD RE4 HD as data drive. OS is Windows Server 2008 Standard x64. Limiting the database size to 700GB you can keep 2 months of video clips, if it's set up to record only when motion is detected. The web server is activated. You need to set up port forwarding in your router to see it from outside and you can watch it in a web browser in your phone. No app is needed. I'm very satisfied with it. I'm about to upgrade the server to BlueIris 5 and Windows 10 Pro.

[kevin1911]

I opted for a QNAP NAS for this reason - they advertise support for up to 8 camera's with the included license.

However, I gave up on it as a Surveillance system after a year or so as the software was quite unreliable and the frequent updates often made things worse rather than better. BI is an improvement, if not quite perfect (yet).