Blue Iris + Deepstack = Amazing NVR

Discussion in 'Technical' started by 3M-TA3, Jun 8, 2021.


  1. 3M-TA3

    3M-TA3 Cold Wet Monkey

    Blue Iris: Full featured NVR software. Not free at $60, but worth far more. Can integrate with almost every camera on the market and is highly configurable. Can send alerts via several methods including an app for your smart phone (additional $10). Lets you do everything your "cloud based" camera system does, but without a monthly subscription and with FULL CONTROL of your data. See video for hardware/software specifications.

    Deepstack: AI that is easily integrated into Blue Iris to help prevent event detection errors.

    Awesome video showing Blue Iris and Deepstack installation and configuration:


    I really can't say enough about Blue Iris. It even has an uber awesome web server so you can monitor from different locations. If you are considering a security camera system give this a close look.

    Great resources:
    ipcamtalk.com
    blueirissoftware.com (forums under the "support" section
     
    mechstdr, Airtime and Ura-Ki like this.
  2. Tempstar

    Tempstar Monkey+++

    Blue Iris needs some serious CPU for anything other than 10 FPS per camera if running 4 cameras, thanks to it being Widoze based. Also be careful in Win 10 as the updates will stop services such as BI. We run BI at work with 10 cams at 20 FPS on a 4 core server and it runs at 83% CPU when all cams are recording. Also be wary of the Chinese cams as every one of them phones home. One needs to look in the router and see the outbound traffic and the ports it is on to shut down the phone home data leak.
     
    mechstdr likes this.
  3. oldman1111

    oldman1111 Monkey

    Those sneaking across the border should be shot on the spot. I bet you money it would stop real quick. Those that did come across legally should not get any money help for at least 5 years. Our country is broke and getting more so every day.
    [flag]
     
    mechstdr and percival like this.
  4. 3M-TA3

    3M-TA3 Cold Wet Monkey

    Yeah, Windows...., not a big Windows fan by a long shot, but Windows does multimedia in my experience better than Linux, and this is a multimedia application. The suggestion to patch and then turn off automatic updates is made in every guide I read, but I know many will ignore or miss.

    Also a good point about cams and security, which is why my network architecture is designed to prevent that. I have a PoE switch that I use for cameras that has no physical access to the Internet, so they are completely isolated. The only thing they have access to is the Blue Iris server which will be used for firmware and configuration as needed. The Blue Iris server is dual homed so it is accessible by the household LAN. Again, a lot of people miss the security concerns of the cameras or just don't care.

    As for performance, a 6th gen i3/5/7 CPU or later does H264 compression natively and that helps quite a lot. The setup used in the video runs 9 4K cameras, though it records a second stream from each at 1080. In a different video he mentions that CPU utilization with Deepstack and Home Assistant doing automation tasks is under 50%.

    You might consider watching the configuration portions of the video. Blue Iris will work with minimal adjustments, but if you want to optimize it then it needs to be tweaked a bit.

    I currently have it running on a $200 Dell 7020 2% CPU with one camera running in service mode. This has a 4th gen CPU so it's doing the compression less efficiently in software. One thing I noted is that if I run the BI application that CPU utilization jumps from 2% to 7%. Using the web interface instead does not increase CPU utilization. So, in addition to checking the config settings, use the web interface to monitor the cameras and only open the non web UI to make changes.

    When I get the cat-6 pulled I'll likely have to get another refurbished computer that's more powerful, but waiting until I need it and also I keep discovering that I need more cameras than I thought - I need six just to cover all the entrances and exits from my house, then the driveway, the backyard and two side yards. Now, I'm up to ten. Oops, doorbell so 11. Then perhaps a few internal...

    Why the need for all that? The times they are a changing, or so the song goes. Yesterday I went to pick up a replacement monitor for my wife I found on FB marketplace. The exit I took from I-205 onto Foster is like all our off ramps - it's a third world tent city. I've noticed over the last year that all the houses just off these off ramps now have the majority of their windows boarded up. Obviously tent cities bring crime. They are all choked with discarded shopping carts and piles of garbage. Permissive policies are like pouring water and fertilizer on weed beds and so it goes. I'm realistically stuck here for three years, but in a relatively safe area.
     
    mechstdr likes this.
  5. Tempstar

    Tempstar Monkey+++

    I'll look into those configs, thanks.
    If you have a neighbor close enough, share your system. I have a camera on the neighbors house that covers my drive, side entrance and part of the backyard, saving me two more cameras. The one covering my front entrance covers his drive and front door, saving one more camera.
    Mine have put two people in jail in the last five years, and the police issued a trespass against a neighbor from down the road who decided he was going to come by and poke around, but didn't take anything.
     
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  6. 3M-TA3

    3M-TA3 Cold Wet Monkey

    If they haven't been using the web page before, by default it closes the connection after a while, like 5 or ten minutes. I looked all over the web server config and couldn't find the setting there. That setting is on the user web page of all places. with their web page open, click on the three dots, then UI Settings.
    upload_2021-6-10_6-2-32.
    Then in UI Settings set the idle timeout to zero
    upload_2021-6-10_6-4-1.

    Figuring this out almost drove me nuts since nobody ever comes right out and says it's the client web browser. I must have had 20 tabs of search results open before I figured it out. The cool thing is that you can monitor the cams from any workstation and by not opening the UI on the server it takes some of the overhead away.
     
    mechstdr likes this.
  7. 3M-TA3

    3M-TA3 Cold Wet Monkey

    A quick update... I posted this thread because the shadows cast by my US Flag was causing false positives late in the evenings. I position the flag so you must pass underneath it in order to enter my house, and that's not negotiable. I needed a way to suppress the false positives and none of the standard adjustments worked.

    I found out that BI could be integrated with DeepStack AI, then ran across this video. I've spent a fair amount of time on this channel so I knew it would be very clear and concise. An hour later no more false positives and no wasted disk storage. Yesterday and today the sky was clear enough that I could clearly see the shadow of the flag waving against the wall, but not a single false positive.

    What is cool about DeepStack is that you tell it what you are looking for based on keywords and a percentage of confidence. I followed the settings directly from the video as a baseline, and so far have not needed to make any adjustments.

    My keywords include those for people, common animals, and vehicles. If the image doesn't comply then it's ignored. For example I don't have the pizza class listed, so if you rolled a pizza across the field of view it shouldn't trigger any events or store any clips. Yups there are food and other detection classes as DeepStack is used by things other than surveillance systems.

    DeepStack configuration and classes/keywords if you are interested. This has a LOT of potential for other applications.
    Object Detection — DeepStack 0.1 documentation
     
    mechstdr likes this.
  8. percival

    percival Monkey

    I use a nas atm with a 5mpx levelone poe cam. Mostly just so I can 'see through the walls'. My neighborhood is crime free so I stopped recording the other day to save the drives from the wear and tear. Cool thread as I want to get another cam. The thought of using my newly created win10 box is interesting in conjunction with Blue Iris software. What I hate is having to buy 4K monitors just to be able to see a 4K stream. Secondary stream recording seems a waste of resources. Why can't the stupid computer simply downscale to 1080? wtf?. 1080 at 30fps is nice but doesn't utilize the full power of the camera. The pc, or phone, should automatically downscale to 1080. I am not going to buy a bunch of 4k screens just to look at a 4k stream. Not gonna do it.
     
    mechstdr likes this.
  9. 3M-TA3

    3M-TA3 Cold Wet Monkey

    If you want to use Blue Iris on your Windows box it's essential that the CPU is Intel and it has the onboard GPU. I don't have any 4K cameras so I can't speak to whether or not BI will scale the image to match monitor resolution, but my expectation is that it would. I don't recall seeing that come up in any of the threads on IP Cam Talk.
     
    mechstdr likes this.
  10. percival

    percival Monkey

    I will never buy intel again because the Intel ME is now baked into the power settings of the hardware itself. IOW, intel wants to make a network aware pc inside of your pc mandatory. My laptop is intel with coreboot bios and the intel me was completely removed by me. If I hit reboot the laptop shuts down, as long as I don't shut the lid too soon. If I want to reboot I have to plug it in first, or shut it down and start it back up. That's the useless pos intel me. Fuck intel in the ass.
    I would have bought an amd laptop but they didn't have one available when I was buying (now they do and now their intels have ten cores too).
    Both my desktop pc's are amd so I guess blue iris is out. On the plus side my nas has 8 licenses for cameras which will display on a windows box with amd. I use a 7" android tablet and of course my phone atm. So if I really want the 4k display I'd have to buy an android tablet with 4k. I'll play around later. My cam still has no sdcard and I think it needs that to get it's full fucnctionality.
    Thanks for the update.
     
  11. 3M-TA3

    3M-TA3 Cold Wet Monkey

    Sounds like Blue Iris is not for you, then. I have nothing against Intel or AMD, and have used used both/either when it made economic sense, and will continue to do so. Seems like sometimes one has the upper hand and at other times it's the other. I'm FAR more concerned with the country of origin and specifically avoid China for any/all components.
     
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