Necessary specs when doing continuous recording

[captain_jim1]

A lot of discussion is built around the necessary hardware specs to do a lot of the computationally heavy work -- motion detection, etc. Obviously, as the number of cameras on a system increases so does the required horsepower.

In some situations motion detection isn't the best option. For example, I currently only have camera (Hikvision DS-2CD2032F-I) and it points at my driveway and the heavily traversed sidewalk and road. Additionally, the traffic light on my corner changes the lighting of my yard at night. For me, simply having the camera doing continuous recording makes the most sense.

My question is - what kind of specs are necessary when doing simple continuous recording? I am currently running Blue Iris on my personal computer and even though it's 5 years old (2001 i7-2620M, 8GB RAM, Win10) it handles the work just fine, but when multitasking I see the CPU start to max out. I am planning on adding more cameras (3-4 max) and setting up a dedicated Blue Iris server. For me it seems that the more simple, less expensive solution is to build a machine with a big hard drive and continue to record continuously (the goal is to retain 1month of videos) than to buy an expensive cpu and try to save HD space.

Does anyone see any real drawbacks to this idea? I acknowledge that I'll end up with storing a lot of useless video and finding important clips might be difficult, but that's a trade-off that I find acceptable. I see new i3-6100u laptops for less than $300. This seems like a much more reasonable idea than a $700 i7-6700 machine.

 

[fenderman]

Welcome to the forum. I dont think you will see much difference by disabling motion detection...you also want motion detection even if you are continuously recording because you will have a marker for motion events and can easily find footage.
You dont need an i7.
Buy an i5-skylake for 300...search the forum for elitedesk or optiplexyour prices are out of whack...https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/13468-Great-deal-on-i7-6700-EliteDesk?highlight=i7-6700
Building a system is a waste of money.
A laptop is a terrible choice for blue iris...
1) most cannot reboot after power outage
2) they can only house 2.5 drives.
3) they are easily moved.

 

[bp2008]

For what it is worth, a 6 TB drive would hold about 1 month of video from 4 cameras if they were all streaming 4 Mbps bit rate.

 

[captain_jim1]

Thanks for the responses.

In regards to motion detecting not using more CPU - how can't it? Continuously monitoring frames for changes vs just dumping a feed to disk is vastly different. I misspoke when I said "build a system"... by that I mean to "choose a system". I don't think laptops are a bad idea aside from the difficulty in finding powerful enough CPUs. Portability isn't a negative IMO... if someone is in a position to take my laptop, they're also able to take my desktop. Having a laptop might allow me to monitor my cams from whatever room I want to. Additionally, yes, internally you can only use 2.5" drives, but external drives with eSata connections are very common. And for rebooting with power outages... I do believe many laptops allow this, plus there's the fact that a laptop might not even NEED to reboot because of it's internal battery. I will look into the EliteDesk and Optiplex options you suggested - thanks for the recommendation!

With one cam running capturing at 1280x720, 15fps, and a max bitrate of 1024kbps I'm averaging about 6gb a day. That's 186gb/month. With 4 cams it'd be 744gb/mo. I would probably look for a 2-4gb WD purple drive and bump up the frame rate & bitrate. I might be able to get away with having some of my future cams use motion detection as they won't be pointed at "busy" areas (my current cam points at a well traversed sidewalk and road) so I could probably reduce the total size some.. of course now I'm going to be requiring a little more CPU.

 

[fenderman]

Thanks for the responses.

In regards to motion detecting not using more CPU - how can't it? Continuously monitoring frames for changes vs just dumping a feed to disk is vastly different. I misspoke when I said "build a system"... by that I mean to "choose a system". I don't think laptops are a bad idea aside from the difficulty in finding powerful enough CPUs. Portability isn't a negative IMO... if someone is in a position to take my laptop, they're also able to take my desktop. Having a laptop might allow me to monitor my cams from whatever room I want to. Additionally, yes, internally you can only use 2.5" drives, but external drives with eSata connections are very common. And for rebooting with power outages... I do believe many laptops allow this, plus there's the fact that a laptop might not even NEED to reboot because of it's internal battery. I will look into the EliteDesk and Optiplex options you suggested - thanks for the recommendation!

With one cam running capturing at 1280x720, 15fps, and a max bitrate of 1024kbps I'm averaging about 6gb a day. That's 186gb/month. With 4 cams it'd be 744gb/mo. I would probably look for a 2-4gb WD purple drive and bump up the frame rate & bitrate. I might be able to get away with having some of my future cams use motion detection as they won't be pointed at "busy" areas (my current cam points at a well traversed sidewalk and road) so I could probably reduce the total size some.. of course now I'm going to be requiring a little more CPU.

Yes, but laptops are stolen for resale...desktops are never taken...internal storage is most reliable...external enclosures add another point of failure. Most laptops do not allow for reboot after power outages...and the battery will not last long running BI...A desktop is idea.
As far as continuous recording, it can be...no need to speculate, The theory is easy to test...you can do this yourself on your own system. Set a profile that only records continuously and switch between that and a motion profile...

 

[bp2008]

Thanks for the responses.

In regards to motion detecting not using more CPU - how can't it? Continuously monitoring frames for changes vs just dumping a feed to disk is vastly different. I misspoke when I said "build a system"... by that I mean to "choose a system". I don't think laptops are a bad idea aside from the difficulty in finding powerful enough CPUs. Portability isn't a negative IMO... if someone is in a position to take my laptop, they're also able to take my desktop. Having a laptop might allow me to monitor my cams from whatever room I want to. Additionally, yes, internally you can only use 2.5" drives, but external drives with eSata connections are very common. And for rebooting with power outages... I do believe many laptops allow this, plus there's the fact that a laptop might not even NEED to reboot because of it's internal battery. I will look into the EliteDesk and Optiplex options you suggested - thanks for the recommendation!

With one cam running capturing at 1280x720, 15fps, and a max bitrate of 1024kbps I'm averaging about 6gb a day. That's 186gb/month. With 4 cams it'd be 744gb/mo. I would probably look for a 2-4gb WD purple drive and bump up the frame rate & bitrate. I might be able to get away with having some of my future cams use motion detection as they won't be pointed at "busy" areas (my current cam points at a well traversed sidewalk and road) so I could probably reduce the total size some.. of course now I'm going to be requiring a little more CPU.

To be honest, I don't know what uses more CPU, recording direct to disk or using motion detection (noting that you can use both at the same time). Theoretically, motion detection would use more CPU. But for a long time, the CPU overhead of motion detection was irrelevant compared to the cost of the h264 video decoding Blue Iris had to do. Now, you can use Intel Quick Sync as hardware acceleration for h264 decoding and get Blue Iris to run a lot leaner than before, so maybe motion detection actually makes a significant impact on usage now. Hard to say without actually running an experiment.

Regarding storage space requirements, it sounds like you are using VBR (Variable Bit Rate) encoding with your one cam, because 1024 Kbps * 1 day = 11.0592 gigabytes. That would be your theoretical maximum disk usage per day per 1024 Kbps camera. I had assumed you would be using 2,3, or 4 megapixel cameras as these are more common and they demand a higher bit rate to look good. In fact 1024 Kbps seems a little low even for 1 megapixel, running at 15 fps. If you ever need to use the video as evidence for anything, you will want it to be the highest quality possible, and that means using a higher bit rate.

 

[bp2008]

One more thing, I have never come across a laptop that will reboot automatically after losing power. They just don't have that setting in their BIOSes. Don't expect a laptop battery (especially an old one) to last longer than an hour or two under the load of Blue Iris.

 

[fenderman]

One more thing, I have never come across a laptop that will reboot automatically after losing power. They just don't have that setting in their BIOSes. Don't expect a laptop battery (especially an old one) to last longer than an hour or two under the load of Blue Iris.

For what its worth my xps 15-9550 can do this but its not common...most consumer laptops cannot...i think the hp business systems can as well, but dont remember for certain..

 

[Skispcs]

I have two systems with 9 hikvision cameras each recording 24x7.
One is an I7-2600K and the other is a I7-4790K, I had tried an I5-4690K but I experienced poor performance compared to the two I7s.
The 2600K runs about 35% CPU and the 4790K runs about 45% CPU. I do not know why but the 2600K seemed to handle video much better than the 4790 did. I was able to encode the same video on the 2600 faster than the 4790 but that is not important now.
Both of them have about 2TB local storage for about 6 to 7 days of video and then offload to a 6TB NAS to keep about a months worth of video on hand.

Not all of the settings on both are the same as I have been tweaking the settings on many of the cameras to attempt to reduce false motion detection or non-important motion detection as they trigger on shadows and sunlight all too often.

 

[fenderman]

I have two systems with 9 hikvision cameras each recording 24x7.
One is an I7-2600K and the other is a I7-4790K, I had tried an I5-4690K but I experienced poor performance compared to the two I7s.
The 2600K runs about 35% CPU and the 4790K runs about 45% CPU. I do not know why but the 2600K seemed to handle video much better than the 4790 did. I was able to encode the same video on the 2600 faster than the 4790 but that is not important now.
Both of them have about 2TB local storage for about 6 to 7 days of video and then offload to a 6TB NAS to keep about a months worth of video on hand.

Not all of the settings on both are the same as I have been tweaking the settings on many of the cameras to attempt to reduce false motion detection or non-important motion detection as they trigger on shadows and sunlight all too often.

Yes, but you are doing motion as well...the OP was wondering what effect disabling motion detection will have.
What resolution are your 9 cameras? What frame rate are you running?

 

[Skispcs]

Yes motion detection on all of the cameras as well as recording 24x7.

Most of the cameras are Hikvision 2132/2142 so they are 1920 or 2048 resolution and around 20 to 30 fps.
I have a couple of other camera models mixed in here and there so there are a couple at 1280 by 720.

I personally have not seen a major change in CPU when disabling motion on a camera or two but I have not tried turning it off on all of them.

 

[captain_jim1]

Thanks for the responses. I ended up purchasing a machine on ebay from a reputable seller. Core i5-6600, 8GB, integrated intel 530 chipset and an SSD. I go a 4TB WD Purple drive to store my continuous footage and I might play around with the motion detection when the time comes. Thanks again for all of your responses!

 

[PSPCommOp]

Yes motion detection on all of the cameras as well as recording 24x7.

Most of the cameras are Hikvision 2132/2142 so they are 1920 or 2048 resolution and around 20 to 30 fps.
I have a couple of other camera models mixed in here and there so there are a couple at 1280 by 720.

I personally have not seen a major change in CPU when disabling motion on a camera or two but I have not tried turning it off on all of them.

Thanks for the responses. I ended up purchasing a machine on ebay from a reputable seller. Core i5-6600, 8GB, integrated intel 530 chipset and an SSD. I go a 4TB WD Purple drive to store my continuous footage and I might play around with the motion detection when the time comes. Thanks again for all of your responses!

@Skispcs Thats pretty impressive storage, I have six 4mp running 24/7 at 20/15/15/10/10/10 fps and i'm getting about 8 days on a 4tb drive.
@captain_jim1, continuous is good with motion triggering it. Its like placing a flag on a particular event in a timeline and i haven't notice a huge spike in CPU with my system which is an i5-4790 with 8GB. Normally it'll run between 23-35% based on motion. I've only ever seen it spike up to the mid 40's once when I was working with BI Tools with a browser open and BI open as a console and all of the cameras were alerting. I think you'll be just fine with CPU usage and storage time and think you'll be happy with what you've spent.