Blue Iris Hardare Requirements

[ffwd]

I have been lurking for a while trying to decide between buying a pre-packaged NVR system or building one that is not locked into a limited set of HW/SW options. Every package I have looked at appears to have its limitations and/or lack of HW/SW support and/or zone-hacking upgrade issues. With 4K making its debut, it would be nice to have a migration path without having to replace an entire system all at once or a mixture of 4K and 1080p.

It looks like Blue Iris is a living software product, handles many vendors cameras, handles many resolutions, scalable, relatively inexpensive, but is a CPU hog. Would prefer a Linux based solution (read: not Microsoft) for a 24/7 server but someone mentioned a $50/camera fee for the next best viable software option.

Is there a URL/sticky/source for Blue Iris hardware requirements and what standards the latest version of what BI leverages ? Their website does not publish a lot of specifics but it does point here.

Also, can anyone quantify the optimizations BI made with its latest software release leveraging hardware acceleration versus its previous software only solution ?

What I have gleaned from the threads so far is the following:

- SSD for OS and app.
- WD Purple Drive to hold recordings.
- H.264 hardware support in Haswell or Skylake processors.
- Memory speed & bandwidth.
- Any other beneficial protocols/standards ?

TIA

 

[Martyj]

Hello Ffwd.

I'm only new here, but happy to share my setup specs.

Originally I installed BlueIris on my media centre (running 24/7). It was an AMD 9590, running Win7 with 16gb of ram from memory.
6 x HikVision 2132's connected, with B.I doing motion detection. The CPU would hover around the 70 to 80% (without any streaming on the media centre side).

I swapped boxes and changed it to an i7 4930k. Now running 7 cams (on Win10) and the CPU stays b/w 15-20 % max.

The i7 is also running Plex (streaming to 2 Roku's) and no problems whatsoever.

**BTW the above is set to 'direct to disk' on recording for each cam.**

 

[ffwd]

....

I swapped boxes and changed it to an i7 4930k. Now running 7 cams (on Win10) and the CPU stays b/w 15-20 % max.

...

MartyJ,

Thanks for the response. Your 4930k is a stout CPU with a lot of memory bandwidth from the specs (http://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz), but it doesn't appear to have any of the graphic hardware accelerators (DirectX, OpenGL, Quick Sync Video-H.264, ...). What graphics card are you using ?

It would be nice to know what CPU hardware extensions B.I. is leveraging in their latest software release and if they can leverage the CUDA cores in a separate graphics card like what various video editing/transcoding software does.

 

[fenderman]

I have been lurking for a while trying to decide between buying a pre-packaged NVR system or building one that is not locked into a limited set of HW/SW options. Every package I have looked at appears to have its limitations and/or lack of HW/SW support and/or zone-hacking upgrade issues. With 4K making its debut, it would be nice to have a migration path without having to replace an entire system all at once or a mixture of 4K and 1080p.

It looks like Blue Iris is a living software product, handles many vendors cameras, handles many resolutions, scalable, relatively inexpensive, but is a CPU hog. Would prefer a Linux based solution (read: not Microsoft) for a 24/7 server but someone mentioned a $50/camera fee for the next best viable software option.

Is there a URL/sticky/source for Blue Iris hardware requirements and what standards the latest version of what BI leverages ? Their website does not publish a lot of specifics but it does point here.

Also, can anyone quantify the optimizations BI made with its latest software release leveraging hardware acceleration versus its previous software only solution ?

What I have gleaned from the threads so far is the following:

- SSD for OS and app.
- WD Purple Drive to hold recordings.
- H.264 hardware support in Haswell or Skylake processors.
- Memory speed & bandwidth.
- Any other beneficial protocols/standards ?

TIA

If you want to future proof the best you can do at this point is get a skylake processor. There is noting wrong with windows, its perfectly stable for a 24/7 system. I have over 20 blue iris machines running just fine.

 

[Martyj]

MartyJ,

Thanks for the response. Your 4930k is a stout CPU with a lot of memory bandwidth from the specs (http://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz), but it doesn't appear to have any of the graphic hardware accelerators (DirectX, OpenGL, Quick Sync Video-H.264, ...). What graphics card are you using ?

It would be nice to know what CPU hardware extensions B.I. is leveraging in their latest software release and if they can leverage the CUDA cores in a separate graphics card like what various video editing/transcoding software does.

My graphics card is only low end - a Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti. I only have limited knowledge and fairly new to this area. My limited understanding was that B.I was mostly CPU driven and not relying on the graphics card.
However someone with more experience may be able to assist in that area!

 

[fenderman]

My graphics card is only low end - a Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti. I only have limited knowledge and fairly new to this area. My limited understanding was that B.I was mostly CPU driven and not relying on the graphics card.
However someone with more experience may be able to assist in that area!

Blue iris now supports hardware acceleration using integrated intel hd graphics with quicksync which is available on almost (maybe all) intel processors that are second generation i processors (sandy bridge) and newer assuming the processor has built in graphics. This helps cpu performance significantly.

 

[ffwd]

Fenderman, thanks for the info.

[begin rant]
As for Windoze, it has only recently became "stable" since it was built on a history of BSOD and fake preemptive multi-tasking technology. I have been using Windoze, [Un/L]inux platforms for decades and have witnessed the progression of "stability" on various platforms over time. Microsoft used Apache servers in house for many years while pushing/selling their own products until they had something that was "stable". They would not run their own busine$$ on their own products. SAMBA ran much faster on the same hardware than SMB. The Windows NT "protected realtime OS" would BSOD with a simple 3 line Fortran program run in user space. Security, size, preemptive multitasking, multi-core, multi-user, large memory support and stability has historically been in favor of [Un/L]nix. If Microsoft was built on a [Un/L]inux core, it would be much more advanced today than what it is given all of its corporate development support over the years. Apache has been the 24/7 server of choice for decades. I have worked on many embedded product developments and they have all been either proprietary RTOS's or Linux variants and they don't contain all of the Windows 10 spyware which is now being applied to the remaining Windows 7 machines via service patches.
[/end rant]

FWIW, it looks like Skylake has the most advanced Quick Sync hardware acceleration. I sent an email to BI to try and find out the specifics of what they are leveraging and what they will be targeting for future releases. Will post their response if they supply one.


Quick Sync development (on CPU graphics)

Quick Sync was first unveiled at Intel Developer Forum 2010 (13 September) but, according to Tom's Hardware, Quick Sync had been conceptualized 5 years before that.[SUP][4][/SUP] The older Clarkdale microarchitecture had hardware video decoding support, but no hardware encoding support.[SUP][1][/SUP] known as Intel Clear Video.

Version 1 - Sandy Bridge (2nd Generation Intel Core Processors)Quick Sync was initially built into some Sandy Bridge CPUs, but not into Sandy Bridge Pentiums or Celerons.[SUP][7][/SUP]

Version 2 - Ivy Bridge (3rd Generation Intel Core Processors)The Ivy Bridge microarchitecture included a "next generation" implementation of Quick Sync.[SUP][8][/SUP]

Version 3 - Haswell (4th Generation Intel Core Processors)The Haswell microarchitecture implementation was focused on quality, with speed about the same as before (for any given clip length vs. encoding length).[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] It has seven hard-coded quality/performance levels (called "target usages"), compared to the three in previous generations. The highest-quality TU1 setting is intended to be higher quality than Ivy Bridge's version, and the highest speed TU7 setting should be faster, higher-quality, and more battery-friendly for mobile devices.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]This generation of Quick Sync supports the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1 and H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 video standards.[SUP][4][/SUP]

Version 4 - Broadwell (5th Generation Intel Core Processors)The Broadwell microarchitecture adds VP8 hardware decoding[SUP][9][/SUP] and encoding[SUP][10][/SUP] support. Also, it has two independent bit stream decoder (BSD) rings to process video commands on GT3 GPUs; this allows one BSD ring to process decoding and the other BSD ring to process encoding at the same time.[SUP][11][/SUP]

Version 5 - Skylake (6th Generation Intel Core Processors)The Skylake microarchitecture adds a full fixed function H.265/HEVC Main/8bit encoding/decoding acceleration, hybrid/partial HEVC Main10/10bit decoding acceleration, JPEG encoding acceleration for resolutions up to 16,000×16,000 pixels and partial VP9 encoding/decoding acceleration.[SUP][12]

[/SUP]
[SUP]Tribute to Microsoft

[/SUP]

 

[fenderman]

Windows has been stable for many years..I have been running blue iris on windows systems for years with no issues. The problems arise when folks gum up VMS systems with other software or malware. There is no spyware in windows, its just that folks like clicking on tech articles that fearmonger so they publish them.
If you insist on linux there are a few vms options that will work but they are much more costly.
Blue iris has just started using quicksync and hardware acceleration. The developer indicated that he is working with intel for even better optimization.

 

[ffwd]

... There is no spyware in windows, its just that folks like clicking on tech articles that fearmonger so they publish them. ...

Have you read the Windows 10 EULA ? The admit they use keyboard input capture. Don't care much about what they say about file access data harvesting either.

From Windows 10 EULA:

“If you open a file, we may collect information about the file, ..., or [if you]enter text, we may collect typed characters, ...”

Here are some of the patches they are adding to Windows 7:

• KB3068708 – This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices.
• KB3022345 (replaced by KB3068708) – This update adds the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to in-market devices.
• KB3075249
• – This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature in order to collect data on elevations that come from low integrity levels.
• KB3080149 – This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices.

These four updates bypasses the existing user preferences stored in Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating system and, as noted by gHacks, immediately starts exchanging your data with the following domains:

​

• vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
• settings-win.data.microsoft.com

 

[fenderman]

Have you read the Windows 10 EULA ? The admit they use keyboard input capture. Don't care much about what they say about file access data harvesting either.

From Windows 10 EULA:

“If you open a file, we may collect information about the file, ..., or [if you]enter text, we may collect typed characters, ...”

You can disable that when you setup windows. IF you are that paranoid then use linux and a vms that runs on linux.

 

[ffwd]

You can disable (SOME, NOT ALL) that when you setup windows. IF you are that paranoid then use linux and a vms that runs on linux.

I fixed it for you.

What Linux VMS packages would you recommend ?

 

[fenderman]

I fixed it for you.

What Linux VMS packages would you recommend ?

You can disable all data collection when you setup windows.
look at exacq vision. You will need to pay 100 per license if you need features like saving to nas and two way audio or more than 16 cameras. Otherwise you can get away with the 50 dollar per camera option.

 

[ipcamdude22]

I am currently running an old pc w/xp with 4 gigs ram and a processor that clocks around 2.2Ghz. It works well but only can handle 3 cams comfortably without maxing out the CPU. I know a person who is selling a pc with 6 gigs ram and an amd a8-5500 processor which clocks at around 3.2 Ghz, also has a 1TB drive. I could get this system for around 200 bucks. Do you think it would handle more cameras and run more efficiently? Let me know what you think? I think the price is ok, but wanted to get some of your thoughts.
Thanks in advance.

 

[fenderman]

I am currently running an old pc w/xp with 4 gigs ram and a processor that clocks around 2.2Ghz. It works well but only can handle 3 cams comfortably without maxing out the CPU. I know a person who is selling a pc with 6 gigs ram and an amd a8-5500 processor which clocks at around 3.2 Ghz, also has a 1TB drive. I could get this system for around 200 bucks. Do you think it would handle more cameras and run more efficiently? Let me know what you think? I think the price is ok, but wanted to get some of your thoughts.
Thanks in advance.

You are being ripped off. Do not buy amd. Blue iris uses intel hd graphics for hardware acceleration. You can buy an hp/dell business machines i5-4590 for 300 dollars with a 3 year warranty! Search the forum for optiplex and elitedesk.
The amd is more power hungry than intel and is also equivalent to a haswell i3.

 

[ipcamdude22]

Thanks for the info fenderman, whag about aHP EliteDesk 800 G1 4th Gen i3-4160 3.6 GHz 4 GB DDR3 500 GB HDD with Win 8.1 Pro? Any thoughts

 

[fenderman]

Thanks for the info fenderman, whag about aHP EliteDesk 800 G1 4th Gen i3-4160 3.6 GHz 4 GB DDR3 500 GB HDD with Win 8.1 Pro? Any thoughts

How much will it cost you? Its not worth saving a few bux when you can get the i5-4590 for 300. You will appreciate the extra power in the future if you go with higher res cameras.

 

[ipcamdude22]

How much will it cost you? Its not worth saving a few bux when you can get the i5-4590 for 300. You will appreciate the extra power in the future if you go with higher res cameras.

Ok sounds good thanks!

 

[ipcamdude22]

How much will it cost you? Its not worth saving a few bux when you can get the i5-4590 for 300. You will appreciate the extra power in the future if you go with higher res cameras.

What about the i5 4690 any big difference

 

[fenderman]

What about the i5 4690 any big difference

Either i5 4590/4690 mentioned will be fine.
Dont get the i3.

 

[ipcamdude22]

Either i5 4590/4690 mentioned will be fine.
Dont get the i3.

Any issue with the elitedesk small form factor machine? Looks pretty good to me.