Blue Iris

I am looking to install Blue Iris as a surveillance server for 3-4 cameras. I don't know an awful lot about the software and had a nagging thought last night that I figured I'd better get answered first.

As this runs on windows. Windows 10 is a service and as such can do some fun things like decide to install new updates and reboot on your. When that happens you are logged out and the system does its own thing and then dumps you back at the login screen. But how does Blue Iris handle this? is it running as a demon service in the background doing it's thing and the program you run is just sort of like a user interface to see what is going on? By that, I know when the windows decides to do its own updates and reboot, any and all software is down. But when it reboots and your stuck at the login screen, will Blue Iris be up and running in the background as and able to do motion detection and send you alerts, or at least be recording and logging the camera feeds?

I was looking at putting this onto a machine that will reside in my wire closet beside the NAS and switches, Pihole server etc.. it won't actually have a monitor hooked up to it. It will be able to Remote Desktop in if I need to view stuff. I would love it if it had a remote web interface that I could just refer to from my other in-house computers. Is there a wiki or something that really goes over how BI works?

There is a 200+ page help file thats pretty helpful included with the installer. To the best of my knowledge it is not available outside the installer package and thats largely because it gets updated/tweaked with every (frequent) release. As IAmATeaf said, yes it can run as a service and auto-start on boot. It also has an integrated web interface (called UI3) that is pretty great IMHO. It's lightweight and does what you'd expect it to. A lot of us run headless/monitorless servers so just use RDP or something similar to remotely manage the system.

Great. I have ordered a referb SFF PC to run Win10pro on. it's an i5-6600 with 8gb ram. I hope that this will be a fast enough machine to run my configuration. Right now the test NUC with the Celeron N3060 doesn't cut it. It does work enough for a single camera as a proof of concept. Thanks for all the help given.

M

For 3-4 cameras I think that should be plenty of system. Of course a lot of that comes down to tuning and configuration. You can easily kill a CPU with the wrong settings.

Both of these articles are very helpful in getting optimized settings:

https://ipcamtalk.com/wiki/optimizing-b ... cpu-usage/

https://ipcamtalk.com/wiki/sub-stream-guide/

Hi roadkill401,

I think you already have most of your comments answered, but:

1. Windows 10 updates - On both my Win10 Home and Pro pc's, I have the option to "Pause Updates for seven days" on the Updates page. When I click that it gives me "Pause updates for seven more days". By doing that you can prevent Win10 updating the pc until you are ready to deal with any problems.
2. If you set BI5 to run as a service it will be OK after reboots and will be running before you log in. You can also set BI5 not to automatically update - do it manually when you have the time to deal with any problems ! Do set BI5 to keep the install files - you may need to go back a version one day.
3. A lot of us do the remote headless pc method. My servers are hidden away, and then I use UI3 to view BI5 on other Pc's, as well as on 4k Firesticks with the Silk browser (It has a mouse pointer).
4. The help file can be accessed by the ? on the BI5 gui, or you can find it at https://blueirissoftware.com/BlueIris.PDF
5. One of my BI5 pc's has an I5-3330. There are presently five 1080 cameras (including sub-streams), two SD cameras, and a Neos cam (Like Wyze V2). The cpu runs at 22% cpu load.

You can follow these steps to stop Windows 10 updates:

In the Run box ( Win + R ), type in “services. msc” and press Enter.
Select the "Windows Update" service from the Services list.
Click on the “General” tab and change the “Startup Type” to “Disabled”.
Restart your machine.

That'll pretty much kill it off. You can also do it through the Group Policy Editor:

Launch the Run command (Win + R). Type in “gpedit.msc” and hit Enter to open the group policy editor.
Drill down through “Computer Configuration” to “Administrative Templates”.
Select “Windows Components” and then “Windows Update”.
Choose the option on the right to “Configure Automatic Updates.”
Select the option that indicates “Notify for download and auto install”.
Click “Apply” and “OK”.
Type “Windows Update” into the Start menu and select “Windows Update Settings.”
Restart your computer to finish updating the group policy editor.

Check for updates. You should be notified by Windows if it finds them, but they shouldn't get installed automatically.

Thank you.

I however was wondering if there is a preferred build for Windows10? When I first got the PC I had the referb dealer install a copy of Windows10 Pro. it gave me an official license with the sticker for $30. figured it was one less thing that I needed to complete. However they installed 21H1 and it didn't want to work well. I had issues with getting Remote Desktop to work. The camera's (ReoLink) just wouldn't work or kept dropping. I decided to do a clean install and set it up with EFI boot at the same time. I used 1909 build and it seems to be quite solid. I am fine with just letting it download all the required updated today, then turn off the updates. The machine really won't be connecting to the internet other than for Blue Iris updates.

Is there a best build of Windows 10 to use? Like should I go with build 2004 or 20H1 build? I am going to be making a new windows install for this computer as I have ordered a power cable splitter for the computer as it only had a single SATA power plug (and a special one for a CD/DVD drive that I don't have installed) So I am pretty sure it can support a second SSD drive for the OS and then replace the 2.5" drive for a 3.5" Purple security 4TB when I have some cash coming in. I figure if I am installing windows again, might as well put the best version onto it.

I would imagine that newer versions of BI5 have been tweaked to work better with the latest version of Win10, so by that logic, any preferred version of Win10 would have to be matched up with a specific version of BI5.

I have found all versions of both to be similar reliability wise. There have been hiccups with BI5 where audio was lost, or the clip video started the wrong file, but these tend to get quickly sorted after an email to support.

The issue I always get is that ANY version of Win10 tends to need rebooting after a week. Nothing shows up as being wrong, but it gets so slow, and then I find I can't even log in remotely. Probably memory leaks, but I can't see anything when I check. I'm wondering if it's time to put Linux server on the main server and run VM's. More complications ! Why can't Win10 just work properly - especially when it costs £$£$ and Linux is free