another camera selection questions :)

[Mark Warren]

Hi Guys,
My apologies if this has been covered before. Such a huge amount of information available here its almost overwhelming!

I'm hoping to set up my first camera system, and was leaning towards blue iris.

I've heard its CPU demanding, and just thought I'd ask here if some cameras will use less resources than others, and if so, which ones would you suggest.
Not looking to spend too much money as this isn't a crutial system or anything.

My intentions were to maybe just have a max of 5 cameras, but most likely even less (maybe 3 outdoors, one USB camera indoor). I have a few different PC's in the house ranging from an i7 with 16gb of ram (my gaming pc) and a htpc (i5/8gb) and thought maybe I could run blue iris on one of those. When I'm gaming or taxing the system, I'd just disable blue iris.

My other thought was to purchase a used rack mounted server which I've been on the fence about installing downstairs for a few other project I have on the horizon.

Just thought I'd check here to see what some of the more experienced guys here would recommend, keeping in mind I'd like to keep the costs down as much as can be.
Thanks for your time!

 

[turbov6camaro]

I n BI on gen 4, core I5, with 16GB of ram I have 3- 3MP cameras and my process run about 25% uses about 1GB of ram. I do not record Direct to disk

 

[Kawboy12R]

As long as the cam supports H.264 you'll be fine. If you really want to save resources over quality, pick 1080P cams over 4-5 MP ones and pay a bit more care to pixel density when matching cam and lens to a job. www.ipvm.com/calculator

I bet your i5 HTPC could stream movies and handle BI just fine. Your video card should be doing all the video crunching for the movie display anyway. The biggest problem might be noise, depending on the HTPC location and cooling fans. I like zero fan noise when watching movies and running BI will add a fair amount of heat even when the system doesn't complain.

My i7 3770 w/GTX 970 hardly notices BI running from an end-user perspective. To tell the truth, Dragon Age: Inquisition actually consistently benchmarks almost half a FPS higher when BI is running than when it's not. No joke. Far Cry 4 has just the slightest touch of additional jitters running with really high video quality at 1440P with BI in the background. The biggest problem with getting in the habit of turning BI off is remembering to turn it back on again. That makes edge recording to SD cards in the cams or to a network share much more important.

From a strict reliability standpoint, I'd recommend from experience that a system dedicated to BI will have better reliability and uptime than one shared with other tasks, even just office work. Considering cash, convenience, and space dedicated to computer stuff, sharing a system _can_ work just fine. Just **** REMEMBER TO TURN BLUE IRIS BACK ON **** if it interferes badly with other things you're doing. Turn that around and it really means that your other tasks interfere with your cameras.

 

[stoney7713]

Run BI as a system operation and add it to your start up folder so it restarts whenever you restart your computer. Also in your BIOS set your computer to restart after a power loss.

I run BI on a machine I use for other tasks also, never shut down BI. But you do inject possible other complications doing so.

 

[fenderman]

Hi Guys,
My apologies if this has been covered before. Such a huge amount of information available here its almost overwhelming!

I'm hoping to set up my first camera system, and was leaning towards blue iris.

I've heard its CPU demanding, and just thought I'd ask here if some cameras will use less resources than others, and if so, which ones would you suggest.
Not looking to spend too much money as this isn't a crutial system or anything.

My intentions were to maybe just have a max of 5 cameras, but most likely even less (maybe 3 outdoors, one USB camera indoor). I have a few different PC's in the house ranging from an i7 with 16gb of ram (my gaming pc) and a htpc (i5/8gb) and thought maybe I could run blue iris on one of those. When I'm gaming or taxing the system, I'd just disable blue iris.

My other thought was to purchase a used rack mounted server which I've been on the fence about installing downstairs for a few other project I have on the horizon.

Just thought I'd check here to see what some of the more experienced guys here would recommend, keeping in mind I'd like to keep the costs down as much as can be.
Thanks for your time!

Dont run blue iris on a machine you use for gaming. A vms should be on its own clean machine. You also dont want a gaming machine with likely a powerhog video card running 24/7.
Dont buy an old server, they are underpowered and power hogs..an cheap 300 dollar i5-haswell machine will pay for itself in under two years verses some old servers. The old machines cannot take advantage of blue iris hardware acceleration which requires intel hd and quicksync.

 

[Mark Warren]

Thanks so much guys for all the advice. I agree running on my gaming pc doesn't really make sense, but I should have noted that my gaming pc and htpc are on 24/7. (I'm also running home automation system off of them, zwave devices and sensors throughout the house etc).

Thanks Kawboy for your advice, I think you're right, I'm content with a 1080 or even 720 would be sufficient.

In all reality, I'm not really a gamer. As it is now, I only own one video game anyways (can you say GTA V?!). I play maybe an hour a month if that. So I don't see the cameras becoming a problem, although if they will run on the htpc i5 I think that would be better than than my gaming rig (the HTPC hasn't had a reboot in months).

I guess I'm open to purchasing an NVR as well, I just thought if I could get more features/performance out of my existing hardware that would be ideal.

Any cameras you guys would suggest?

Thanks again for all your opinions, it's really appreciated!

 

[Mark Warren]

Dont run blue iris on a machine you use for gaming. A vms should be on its own clean machine. You also dont want a gaming machine with likely a powerhog video card running 24/7.
Dont buy an old server, they are underpowered and power hogs..an cheap 300 dollar i5-haswell machine will pay for itself in under two years verses some old servers. The old machines cannot take advantage of blue iris hardware acceleration which requires intel hd and quicksync.

I'm not familiar with quicksync really. Is intel HD based on the CPU? Or is this a GPU process? Because none of my pcs use intel gpus.... (i5/i7 pcs are both using dedicated nvidia gtx cards)