Restrict Certain Cameras to Users

[essjay]

I've been playing around with BI now for a few days and I have a particular use case that would be great if possible.

So my dad has a couple of cameras at home (low res 640x480's). I'd like to use my BI machine to record those cameras. Is it possible for me to set up two users in BI (him & me) and assign his two cameras only to his user. Have him install the BI Android app but only be able to view his two cameras and alerts?

 

[fenderman]

Groups...

 

[bp2008]

You can't hide his cameras from the "All cameras" group but you can restrict user accounts to be able to only view certain camera groups.

Even old 640x480 cams are going to use a ton of internet bandwidth. I hope you know what you are doing, if those cameras aren't on the same LAN as your BI machine.

 

[essjay]

At home I have an 80meg connection with unlimited downloads so hopefully that should be ok? I can test and if it's killing my connection I can drop his two cameras. But from looking at the same two cameras I have they seem to be around 500kb a second.

Trying to figure out these groups. Can two cameras be in the same group? I can seem to create a group from the settings of a camera but when I switch to another camera I can't see the group to select.

 

[fenderman]

Yes a camera can be in multiple groups...see the help file

 

[essjay]

No, what I mean is how do you create groups that appear in other cameras setting?

I have Camera1 and Camera2

If I go into Camera1, click the select groups button and type in "CameraGroup1" then click the "Add" button it appears in the list. If I then go into Camera2 and click the select groups button there is no "CameraGroup1" there to select.

 

[bp2008]

You may need to restart Blue Iris before the group will appear. I think this might be a bug caused by running BI as a service, as I think I ran into it once in the past, maybe.

An 80 Mbps download connection is a great plenty for your end. What is the upload speed at your dad's place though? If you are maxing out his upload, it would make his internet perform like crap.

 

[essjay]

I've connected to his cameras and there's an issue somewhere. One camera is 2fps and the other is 0.6fps.

Thanks, I'll try disabling as a service until everything is configured

 

[bp2008]

I've connected to his cameras and there's an issue somewhere. One camera is 2fps and the other is 0.6fps.

Do you know if BI is streaming mjpeg from the cameras, or if it is only refreshing a jpeg snapshot? Low upload speed would affect the frame rate of both, but high latency would affect the refreshing jpeg method much more than actual "mjpeg".

 

[essjay]

I got him to do a speed test and for some reason he's only getting 0.6Mbps upload so that would explain his issues. He'll phone his ISP in the morning.

Thanks!

 

[nayr]

two 640x480 MJPEG streams at a mere 10FPS are going to require ~5Mbit upload speeds.. thats well in excess of any budget internet plans, and even many ISP's offerings.

two 640x480 H264 streams at 10FPS would only require 1.5Mbit upload speeds, thats more reasonable but still several times more than what your dad currently has available.