Does QuickSync matter with direct-to-disk recording?

[alexandroid]

Hi all, newbie question - I was reading the forums here and saw a lot of references to QuickSync being necessary to keep CPU usage down / more efficient etc. Since all IP cameras these days encode H.264 or H.265 themselves, I don't understand where the need to encode/decode for BlueIris comes in here...

For my home scenario I am thinking I will mostly use constant direct-to-disk recording without having a live feed screen and without motion sensing. Maybe occasional viewing of live feed remotely from the phone but in that case it will be 1 camera at a time. But even for that I would expect BI would just forward me the encoded feed from the camera and my phone would decode it.

So where is the need for QuickSync encoding/decoding comes into play in this scenario? What am I missing? Is it for surveillance stations with live feed monitors & motion sensing stuff enabled? I am still planning on getting an Intel with QuickSync, but it seems to me that disk I/O is where the main bottleneck will be, not CPU / encoding & decoding (I anticipate about 8 cameras, likely 2MP-4MP each).

 

[sebastiantombs]

BI has to "process" the video to analyze it for motion, not just for recording. Quicksync offloads that processing to the video controller rather than the CPU hence lowering CPU utilization.

 

[alexandroid]

BI has to "process" the video to analyze it for motion, not just for recording.

So it does this analysis regardless whether I use motion sensing feature or not? Even if all I need is 24/7 recording and no alerts?

 

[fenderman]

So it does this analysis regardless whether I use motion sensing feature or not? Even if all I need is 24/7 recording and no alerts?

Yes. Unless you select limit decoding see wiki before using or you will be back here asking whats wrong. Blue iris now allows using the substream for decoding which significantly reduces cpu consumption. See wiki.
even with no alerts and 24/7 recording you will want alert markers so you can see generally where motion occurred.

 

[alexandroid]

Awesome, thank you both!

 

[ktoen]

Adding to the question here since it's related.. Looking at getting a SFF PC for Blue Iris and with recent developments in QuickSYnc (7th gen Intel and up), can we go with more lower-end chips to handle more cameras now? I'm looking at 6-8 4MP cameras, and the current chart is based off used old chips..

This SFF PC is an example: here.

A 2C/4T chip but with a more recent QuickSync, and since it's great for Plex transcodes, does that translate to being able to handle Blue Iris well?

 

[sebastiantombs]

A SFF is not the way to go, too little hard drive space. Any processor other than a "standard" processor is not a good choice. The laptop, and laptop style, processors are not designed to run "full loads" in a nonstop manner the way BI uses a processor. You might get away with it using sub streams, but if it were me I'd stick to a processor made to handle full loads full time. Plex is still not the same as BI when it comes to loads. Plex does one stream for an hour or two, BI in your estimate will be doing six to eight, 24x7, and that is a very significant difference.

 

[ktoen]

Well I'd actually have it offload storage to NAS, it'd be mainly there to just run Blue Iris. Was thinking if it would have issues at all since it can handle like 20+ Plex transcodes at a single moment with how improved QuickSync is now. Was just wondering if there was a lot more going on besides encoding that requires more processing power.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Again, BI is a 24/7 operation. Is Plex? Do what you want, it's your money to burn. You can find an i3, late generation, with Win10 already on it for a few bucks more and not have to experiment, and potentially fail.

 

[bp2008]

Hi.

When you remote view with Blue Iris, you are always watching video that was transcoded by Blue Iris. It does this mainly to guarantee compatibility with the viewing client/network (basically the same reasons Plex might transcode a video). The difference being that Plex can often stream the original video without transcoding, whereas Blue Iris has not implemented this.

Speaking of Plex, the reason Plex works on less powerful CPUs is because it typically only has to work with one video stream at a time. Quick Sync was basically designed for the purpose of decoding ONE video stream and re-encoding it as quickly as possible. (such that you could transcode a 2 hour movie in a matter of minutes). This is one of the reasons Quick Sync had memory leak problems for so long. When using Quick Sync for its original purpose of short-lived transcodes, most people never even knew it was leaking memory because the leaked memory would get reclaimed as soon as the job was done.

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Blue Iris does decode incoming video all the time even when you'd think it would not be needed. I don't know the reasons, but can make some very educated guesses why the video is always decoded:

• To verify that the stream is running properly
• To ensure that decoded video is always available immediately when the need suddenly arises for it (no need to initialize decoders, which can take time).

If you're sure you are not going to use BI for live view or motion detection then you can turn on the "limit decoding" function which limits decoding to keyframes only (typically 1 frame every second or two).

Plex does similar work to Blue Iris, in that it reads a video stream