Intro and design questions

[StphNieuw]

Hello,
New to the forum but have been lurking for quite some time. I finally bit the bullet and am significantly upgrading my cameras after another incident where my old system left me with limited quality footage for the police. I have settled on Blue Iris have quite a bit of research on this forums and its posted videos. I am a reasonably techie (17+ years in IT in the ERP space) individual that can figure most things or google it

Background:
I had a coax based Lorex 720p system that served my decently for quite some time, after the DVR died I bought a cheap DVR from TigerSecu (Amazon special) that served my decently with 8 (720p and1080p) cameras. During our renovation I was able to run quite a bit of Cat6e wire as the walls where open and started upgrading the current system that is able to take both coax and IP based cameras.

Current state:
I started installing Amcrest 5mp and 4k cameras. I currently have 8 of the 12 cameras connected to the DVR and want more. I love having a TV in the kitchen with the cameras on and being able to pull up the RTST streams on other TVs in the house. I just ordered another 4 cameras bringing the total to 12 Amcrest IP cameras (7 @ 4k and 5 @ 5mp). I also purchased a refurbished workstation (i7-8700 work station with 32gb of ram (a little overkill) and SSD for OS & Blue Iris and a 6TB purple security drive for recording of footage. I have all of my cabling (Cat 6 & cat 6+) coming to my closet as its a nice central location in the house. From my closet to the current dvr is Cat6e cabling.

Questions:
The current location where I have my DVR is away from my "server closet" by 30ft. We have and would like to have a TV/monitor in the kitchen permanently on showing my camera feeds. It is great to see if someone is at the door or anywhere else for that mater. I have wired ethernet (cat6E) to this area from 'server closet' to the current dvr. Question for the community, would it make more sense to have the server in the 'server closet' (headless type setup) and then a mini-pc in the kitchen to show the camera feed via UI3, or just put the server in the kitchen and have a display shows the feeds? (Not as worried cosmetically as I have a decent storage either way for the server.)

Is there a performance impact from showing the feeds through UI3 vs. natively on the monitor from the server? When I looked at the benchmark it appeared quite a few folks where running them headlessly and then displaying else where? Ultimately I would like to have several 3-4 viewing locations (1 kitchen, 1 upstairs, 1 office), is this too much from a resource perspective (not mental perspective . I currently stream some of the new Amcrest IP cameras via RTSP feed via my apple TV but really like the videos on the UI3 interface. I was able to find quite a few mini-pc with Intel Celeron processors 8gb of ram and a small SSD driver for 250$ (shocking how cheap they have gotten) that should be able to stream quite easily.

I tried to search extensively for streaming requirements, UI3 streaming requirements and wasn't able to locate anything relevant. The initial Blue Iris resource planning seemed reasonable clear to me.

Thanks,
Stephan

 

[mat200]

..Question for the community, would it make more sense to have the server in the 'server closet' (headless type setup) and then a mini-pc in the kitchen to show the camera feed via UI3, ...

Welcome @StphNieuw

I prefer to have my servers in the data closet / rack

Also things in the kitchen typically get greasy so better to keep more important tech equipment out of the kitchen imho

 

[StphNieuw]

Thanks for the input. Fortunately its far enough from the kitchen, its a large open space layout. Is a Mini-PC typically enough to drive a UI3 24/7 live view display?

 

[sebastiantombs]

A tablet or phone can display UI3 with no problem. No need for a mini PC. If you have an older tablet hanging around it can be "recycled" as your display. If you want something with a bigger display, then maybe a mini PC, NUC, would work out, but again any older one you have hanging around will work for that as long as it has either an ethernet port or WiFi.

 

[StphNieuw]

Awesome! Thanks for the prompt feedback

 

[StphNieuw]

Also what is the impact of running multiple UI3 browsers on the server?

 

[sebastiantombs]

Each UI3 instance will add a few percent to CPU utilization. If the system is configured properly that shouldn't be much of a problem. There is a guide, in the WiKi, to maximize efficiency in BI which will help a lot, plus the new substream feature of BI can reduce CPU loading significantly.

 

[Silvermoose]

You could also use an RPI for remote viewing. I have an RPI4 that I use to display my cameras and also my weather station data on 2 monitors. That's the nice thing about RPI4 and dual HDMI out. It's hard wired so I'm not sure how wifi would work

L8tr
D

 

[StphNieuw]

Thanks for the input. Fortunately living in New Orleans most folks have raised houses so its 'quite easy' to pull cat6e wire underneath as long as you don't mind tight spaces. The spot where I was planning to have the monitor is hardwired so that should help quite a bit. In many of these old homes wifi strength is limited due to the old plaster walls so I try and wire where I can.