is there a "best practices" guide for camera setup in BI?

[JayBart]

I just built a new setup, running 15 brand new dhaua cameras, with a somewhat dated system (which I'll upgrade at some point) -- I don't want to sacrifice quality, but are there any settings I should be mindful of, that don't really impact quality, but can significantly impact cpu usage (for example, a few revs back, selecting "direct to disk" saved lost of cpu cycles, not sure if that's the case anymore) .

Thanks!

 

[wittaj]

Assuming you have already dialed the cameras in (took them off of default/auto settings and using the appropriate FPS and bitrate for the cameras you have), simply follow all of the optimizations in the wiki to maximize BI.

Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage

Blue Iris uses a lot of CPU time. In most Blue Iris installations, your CPU is the limiting factor which determines how many cameras you can have. As such, it is extremely important to optimize your configuration to ensure you can get the most out of your system while consuming the least...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[looney2ns]

One of the most important steps is to make certain you have excluded BI from any antivirus, this includes Windows defender.
As per the instructions in the BI help file.

 

[JayBart]

ok, thanks.. very helpful!
for whatever reason, I was crusing along at 40ish percent load on the cpu, then just added two today, and getting slammed -- I have all the cameras on 10fps, assuming that's not too much?

 

[wittaj]

10FPS is fine.

40% seems high unless you aren't using substreams or it is a really bad computer for BI.

What is your "dated" system. Is it intel and if so, what i number and generation number?

My humble i5-4590 still humming along with 30+ cams:

I see people posting about their i7-xxxx system bogging down with less than 10 cameras so I wanted to update my setup. I have ~33 cams running on my BI system: HP Elitedesk 800 G1 tower i5-4590 @ 3.3GHz 16GB ram 12TB total purple drives for storage 30+ total cams currently - 22 cams visible in...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[JayBart]

10FPS is fine.

40% seems high unless you aren't using substreams or it is a really bad computer for BI.

What is your "dated" system. Is it intel and if so, what i number and generation number?

My humble i5-4590 still humming along with 30+ cams:

I see people posting about their i7-xxxx system bogging down with less than 10 cameras so I wanted to update my setup. I have ~33 cams running on my BI system: HP Elitedesk 800 G1 tower i5-4590 @ 3.3GHz 16GB ram 12TB total purple drives for storage 30+ total cams currently - 22 cams visible in...

ipcamtalk.com

so turns out a bunch.. almost half .. didn't have direct to disc encoding on. Turning it on for all cameras dropped me back down to 25%-30% cpu usage, 8% gpu usage.

The system is a 6950x (no quicksync), 64 gigs ram, 2080ti gpu, with a fairly large storage array (6x 22tb seagate iron wolf, and a 24tb raid 0 array of 6x 4tb sd's)
I know -- it's overkill in some areas and complete underkill in others, and not ideal for BI. it's a server I built a few years ago as an experiment to virtualize a gamming system (believe it or not, actually worked), and super reliable, runs months and months on end without a hiccup. it works, and works well now that I realized the config was screwed up, though not a model of efficiency.

That said, it's on my list to build a much newer, efficient later system using a cpu with quicksync, ditch the GPU, likely reuse the mechanical discs and one of the sd's as a boot drive.

 

[wittaj]

Keep in mind that with the addition of substreams with BI, QuickSync isn't needed anymore.

 

[JayBart]

yup, that tracks. I'm pretty steady now at 25%. I'm sure I can optimize more -- I'm not using substreams, something I need to dive into
the system is also in a server room and I'm accessing it through a remote desktop, which I'm sure is adding to the issues. but 25% with 15 cameras at 4000x3000 resolution doesn't seem too bad.

 

[JayBart]

as a post script to this, got around to setting up substreams -- for 15 dahaua cameras recording at 4000x3000, with substreams at 720p set up, I'm running at 15-17% consistently, and about 9% on the gpu. Very nice! I may actually keep this hardware.

 

[scoob8000]

FWIW, I did what wittaj suggested about a week ago and disabled the hardware acceleration on all my cams. On average my CPU usage stayed right about the same, however memory usage went down a bit. Clock speeds and power consumption stayed about the same too. I have 14 cams, all but 3 of them have substreams, but those are low res (1080) cams anyway.

 

[Ri22o]

FWIW, I did what wittaj suggested about a week ago and disabled the hardware acceleration on all my cams. On average my CPU usage stayed right about the same, however memory usage went down a bit. Clock speeds and power consumption stayed about the same too. I have 14 cams, all but 3 of them have substreams, but those are low res (1080) cams anyway.

Would that be setting this to "no"?

 

[looney2ns]

Yes, then restart the cameras or restart BI.

 

[scoob8000]

Would that be setting this to "no"?

That is correct correct.

There is a global setting too under the main settings, but I found toggling it didn't stop the hw decode for me. I had to change it in each cam like your screenshot.