Is Blue Iris a "One stop shop"?

[greenmarcus_02]

As a noob, reading all the helpful information can become overwhelming at times. In regards to Blue Iris, would you consider this software a "One stop shop" for IP cameras? I have seen BI, Smart Pss, ONVIF, TinyCam Pro amongst several others. What is the preferred software to setup, maintain and observe if you will for IP cameras?

 

[wantafastz28]

It all depends on what your needs and wants are... it takes care of everything I want for my home cameras. Overall I'm very happy with it.

 

[cryptelli]

I have seen BI, Smart Pss, ONVIF, TinyCam Pro amongst several others. What is the preferred software to setup, maintain and observe if you will for IP cameras?

1. Blue Iris is a PC equivalent of a hardware NVR.
2. Smart PSS can also be installed with "PC NVR" which will allow it to function as an NVR albeit with much less functionality of Blue Iris or a hardware NVR (please see @fenderman's remark on compatibility below).
3. ONVIF is a standard which allows VMS software to control cameras which comply.
4. TinyCam Pro can be setup to act as a cheap NVR/DVR/Video Recorder but have never tried and the result probably wouldn't be worth it.

 

[fenderman]

Note that smart pss will only work with dahua or dahua rebranded cameras...

 

[bp2008]

I would say Blue Iris is a "one stop shop" for IP cameras. It works with nearly everything, and has an extremely wide feature set, most notably the ability to record and play back video.

By "ONVIF" I assume you mean "ONVIF Device Manager", which is really just designed to be a handy tool, not a program designed for camera monitoring. "ONVIF" is basically a standardized communication protocol designed to let cameras from manufacturer A work with video recorders from manufacturer B. TinyCam Pro, being a mobile app, is also not something you would run 24/7 to monitor and record video, but it does a good job of connecting directly to cameras to view live video.

Smart PSS is more like Blue Iris, but not nearly as feature-rich or widely compatible.

 

[alexvas]

tinyCam dev is here.
tinyCam PRO is slowly moving to 24/7 recording solution for devices running Android. It will become "Blue Iris for Android", it is just the question of time

Right now you can very easily setup local storage video recording in tinyCam and view recording via web browser.
Here is a demo of tinyCam running 24/7 for weeks without any reboot with two IP cameras on Amazon Fire TV 1st Gen (headless). It records on motion.
https://demo.tinycammonitor.com:8083/
Username: guest
No password

Beside local storage recording, tinyCam introduced cloud video recording to record directly to Amazon Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, ownCloud, Nextcloud.

 

[bp2008]

Here is a demo of tinyCam running 24/7 for weeks without any reboot with two IP cameras on Amazon Fire TV 1st Gen (headless). It records on motion.

Interesting, but I think we crashed it..

 

[hmjgriffon]

Interesting, but I think we crashed it..

ha haaaaa

 

[alexvas]

Interesting, but I think we crashed it..

Unlikely. There is flood protection in app internal web server. Try again.
Use Google Chrome browser and accept self-signed certificate.

 

[bp2008]

Hmm, I don't think I was hitting it nearly hard enough to trigger any kind of flood protection... unless your flood protection simply disables the web server if it gets too much traffic from all sources together.

If I may make a suggestion, some of the pages take a few moments to load and it isn't immediately apparent that your click did anything at all. It may be a good idea to start some kind of loading animation before you begin loading a new page.

 

[wantafastz28]

Worked for me. 2 cams

 

[looney2ns]

Worked for me, although I get a "insecure connection" error. Say's cert can't be confirmed.

 

[thewolf56]

I see 2 cams also, but I see a lot of dropped frames from the IPV68P2P.

 

[alexvas]

I see 2 cams also, but I see a lot of dropped frames from the IPV68P2P.

The problem with web server live view is that the app transcodes H.264 stream into MJPEG to show video via web browser without any plugins. The device that runs tinyCam is not so powerful for that. That's why there are dropped frames in live view. But there is no dropped frames if you watch recorded footage (no transcoding) https://demo.tinycammonitor.com:8083/IPV68P2P/

 

[rnatalli]

BI gets my vote. Milestone is also good for a free option.