Raspberry Pi - Creating a substream

[D0T-C0M]

I installed 2 cameras, One is a raspberry pi 4 with a HQ 12MP camera with a 6mm lens. The second is a Raspberry pi zero running a Pi 8MP V2.1 noir camera. These camera are now set up as headless raspberry Pi IP cameras. The Pi4 is streaming rtsp at 1080p 30fps h264 and the Pizero is streaming 720p at 30fps h264. Both are using under 15% CPU. I read that you can use a substream at a much lower resolution for motion detection and then it will switch to the high resolution stream to record triggered events.

I do not record continuous so disk space is not an issue but I was thinking of using this dual stream function to minimizing the throughput through my home network. That being said I'm assuming that Blue Iris will connect to the lower rez stream to monitor for motion and once detected will it change to the high rez stream to record the triggered event. Is this the case or is blue iris connecting to both stream simultaneously? If the latter than I'll have 2 streams from each camera which will increase my local lan traffic? I'm hoping that BI physically connects to the stream it needs leaving the other dormant until needed.

 

[biggen]

Substreams are the ability of a single camera to provide TWO distinct video streams. So, one stream would be HD+ and the other would be much lower. But this depends on your camera. Not all cameras have that ability. Blue Iris has nothing to do with the substream capability of your camera. You must provide BI the address to the main stream and the address to the substream for each camera.

Blue Iris has to connect to both streams all the time. So its always pulling the streams down regardless of whether its recording or not.

I wouldn't worry about network "stress" from cameras unless you are on wireless and even then, that Pizero is only streaming at 720. I'd reduce it down to 15fps since you really don't need 30fps for surveillance.

 

[D0T-C0M]

I know that BI has nothing to do with the substream capabilities of the cameras, my question was , does BI simultaneously connect to both streams at once or does it only connect to the one is wants to use? The reason I ask is if it disconnects the stream it isn't using, that means my IP camera will cease to transmit that stream while nothing is connected to it.

 

[biggen]

I know that BI has nothing to do with the substream capabilities of the cameras, my question was the camera streams nothing if nothing is connected to it. My question is does BI simultaneously connect to both streams at once or does it only connect to the one is wants to use? The reason I ask is if it disconnects that means my IP camera will cease to transmit the stream while nothing is connected to it.

Yes, BI must always maintain a stream whether its recording or not. So if you enable substreams on both cameras you will get 4 total streams going to BI 24x7 whether they are writing to the disk or not.

 

[D0T-C0M]

ok THANKS