Ok.. Help me explain this to my wife...

[mtsoule]

Currently we have about 16 AHD camera with an old Night Owl DVR in our 100 year old house.. We are looking to move to BI, i have a couple of POE IP cams set up and running on the eval..

it appears, that BI works best when recording are 'Triggered', i tried to do continuous recording, but that shot my CPU usage up to 100%. especially at full resolution..

i told her that it needs to be triggered, and when the camera sees motion, then it will start recording. she doesn't like that, she said that we will not be able to catch ghosts that way, because they wont trigger the camera..

So... now what....

[Matts1984]

Assuming you have the disk space..... I think I might try to entertain your wife so you can get your videos of Casper and Slimer.

I've tinkered with BI settings, and the settings of my cameras, quite a bit and it's made HUGE changes to CPU utilization. My system used to easily run idle at 40% - spikes higher when I was doing something. Now the same system more or less runs at 5% with spikes to 10ish... maybe 20 if I'm feeling adventurous.

You mentioned you're still running the BI eval license. Others may know for sure, I can't remember, but I think Direct-to-Disk recording is only capable/enabled with a real license. That alone makes a tremendous difference. You can also make big gains with changing FPS, what that max resolution is, sub streams, etc.

The reason I recommend exploring this more first:
A) You can always default to your proposed solution if this doesn't work
B) I personally had an experience where a trigger DIDN'T happen and someone approached my truck at 2am on a bike and looked through windows with a flashlight. Note that a trigger didn't happen - but I have the video to prove it.
C) Blue Iris is really flexible and has a lot of options, but is also admin friendly for the most part and there is a reason why most of us here think it's the best. We're not Homers about it, we've tried others. I have a pretty decent server, but the hardware is admittedly 10+ years old. Other than the fear of eventually having hardware failures, I'm very happy with it.

If you'd like us to help, or try to help, some basic system specs as well as a screenshot of your "Blue Iris Status > Cameras" tab would help a lot. Hopefully someone can confirm the Direct-To-Disk question too!

EDIT: Also, my experience with a wife has also taught me it never hurts to say "Honey, you were right. I'm going to make it happen"

[mtsoule]

True!! i know there is a LOT con configuration, and can be set up to do just about anything!! just going to take some learning..

it seems the Eval WILL do Direct to disk, the option is there ,but i dont know if it is actually doing it...

i tried to attach a screen shot, but it keeps saying image too large.. only about 500k jpg

[Matts1984]

Hmm yeah I know there is a tight threshold with attachments but I don't recall what it is. Maybe open the capture in paint and shrink it down and resave. Should be possible to get under 100k

[mtsoule]

i think it attached...

[Matts1984]

It does look like it's set for Direct-to-Disk and I assume thats not something thats "set but doesn't work" but until we know otherwise, I think assume it's correct. Based on your specs, it's not a monster system but I think should still be able to handle at least some cameras.

Can you provide your data like this below?

Cap.jpg (153.25 KiB) Viewed 5838 times

[HeneryH]

I record always with an older computer and add triggers to mark a sort of bookmark and get alerts.

Something is amiss in your config.

[mtsoule]

Currently, i just have 3 camera.. and like i said if i dont trigger, it will shoot my cpu usage to 100%.. But now.. i just put the 3 cams back to continous recording and my CPU is at 45%.. i wonder if Windows was doing something the first time...

Also, again, i am just starting with ip cameras.. my inital thoughts was to build a system and put it on my 10G network, but then i notices all the cameras only link at 10Mbs, so i dont think that neccessay.. is 10MBs link normal?? i assume so..

[HeneryH]

I was under the impression that the Eval version didn't support D2D which would explain a LOT of cpu usage as the processor would be reconverting all of the video feeds again so that they could be written to disk.

Sorry, this may be old news to the discussion. I should read more to keep up with what has already been discussed.

[Matts1984]

So I'm pretty confident in what has been said about Direct-to-Disk in the eval version. The option is clearly enabled but I don't think it actually does it unless activated. I'm unaware of a way to see if it's actually happening though but based on what I've seen on "the other forum" we dare not mention, it seems confirmed.

I also see your FPS settings and Keyframes (keys/iframes/etc - all reference same thing) might be able to be optimized to help. You have to find the balance of what is acceptable to you vs the performance impact. Generally most people find anywhere from 10 - 15 FPS acceptable. I set mine, as you can see in my screenshot to 10. The result is not a perfectly fluid video, it's not cinematic quality, but for security footage I'm pretty happy with it. Also consider the difference in 10 - 15 FPS is 50% more processing. Keyframes are kind of like the "master image" of the feed and then everything in between is a delta of that image. Blue Iris recommends keyframes to be set to 1.0 but it should be at least .50. The longer the interval (1.0 is one per second) helps performance at the risk of losing video quality... in theory with a decent camera and stable network, it should be negligible though. Take a look at Pg. 80 in the help document.

Another spot you could get big performance gains is by adding Substreams. This will add an additonal, much lower resolution, stream to BI - resulting in slightly higher bandwidth utilization - while allowing triggering and processing to be done on the low res which is more than sufficient for most purposes. All of your recordings are still done with the Main stream at full resolution. Your console and UI3 page will display the substreams under normal circumstances (this still is pretty good quality IMHO) and will autoswitch to the main stream if one of them is selected. To put another way..... if all your cameras are displayed on the screen in the cluster, you're likely passively watching it if at all. If you select a feed because of something of interest, the system will automatically switch to the higher quality. To put some of this into perspective, compare our two screenshots. I know you're only running 3 cameras so far but collectively they're having an impact of 1622 kB/s on the network and 270 Mpixels/s of content to process. On my system, with substreams enabled, I'm receiving 2504 kB/s but only processing 15.4 Mpixels/s. My mainstreams are 3.7 MP/s but the subs are a measly 0.3.

You also asked about the network. First - a 10G backbone, impressive! Second, every camera I've seen has 100Mbps links. Doing the math from kB/s -> Mb/s, your total network load is approximately 15 Mb/s so I think you're fine with whatever the cameras negotiate at to a 1G server interface.