I created this thread after searching around for posts on the subject of meshing Avigilon cameras with Blue Iris. To my surprise, there were none. I was looking for a thread with former Avigilon Control Center ("ACC") 5, 6, and 7 users to see what they had to say. Because, if you ask me, although it gets seldom mention in this forum, imho, it's Avigilon/Motorola's ACC series that most directly competes with Blue Iris. And to be honest, it's because BI has just continuously improved so much, that they are now getting close to Avigilon's rare air. For those that aren't aware, Avigilon is contracted by many federal agencies, including the U.S. military, to monitor it's bases and outposts.

Whatever the case, for someone searching for Avigilon topics here in the Blue Iris Software forum, it most likely won't be for anything having much to do with their ACC software, but much more likely because they no longer use ACC, and want to start using their cameras with BI. And, it's not so simple to use these excellent cameras with BI because, like Apple, the software and the hardware are kind of meshed. Kind of, ..Avigilon cameras are excellent Onvif/PTZ/Dual stream/PoE standard cameras, and with a little bit of looking into mesh perfectly with BI. Now this is the H3, H4, and higher lines. The fantastic clarity JPEG2000 standard multi-head (360-HD & 180-HD) cameras I'm afraid, are something I just couldn't get to work right, even with the firmware upgrades.

I loved ACC7. It worked flawlessly and effortlessly on even a weaker i5 PC. The demo for thirty days was heaven. After a lot of effort, I was then able to get a single camera license for about $78 USD. But that's just the one camera. I have eight total. When I went to get the next license, they quoted around $110 USD for the "Standard" tier level. It just was going to be too expensive, and I needed cameras up and running. So, I looked around and found Blue Iris Software. I thought I really loved Avigilon's ACC7, But now that I have became more knowledgable with Blue Iris, I absolutely love Blue Iris.

What ACC7 kind of does "plug n' play", you learn the "under the hood" with Blue Iris. With Blue Iris one can get far more done, with AI, with plate reading, with face recognition, with auxilliary Bit I/O triggers, with sound, far cheaper, and gaining way more experience. With ACC7, I learned very little, the software makes all the decisions. It's not really made to grow into, it's just made to pay a lot of money for, and use right off. I mean, for me, like $800+ versus the $69 I paid for Blue Iris. And that doesn't include getting newer cameras as Avigilon will phase out perfectly great camera models that can no longer be used on newer generation platforms. And that is ACC7's "Standard" tier, that leaves out a lot of high tech extras. The "Enterprise" tier is awesome, but would have cost at least $149 USD per camera.


I have eight Avigilon's: five 5.0-H3-B2's with the Avigilon 700 series heated, shatter-sensor enclosures, one 1.0-H3-DC1, a 8.0-DOME-HD-180 degree, and a 8.0-DOME-HD-360-degree. I run these on an AMD FX processor, with 16 gigs of RAM on Win10 Pro, with a GeForce 760. I'm working on a Lenovo TS430 ThinkServer (4x300GB Seagate Cheetah HDs that's going to take over.

Currently the system has the five 5.0-H3-B2s and the one 1.0-H3-DC1 running at 15fps/1.0 Keyframe ratio, all dual stream at 1920x1080 or so resolution. The system, as this version of it, is now finally what I would call stable. The biggest hurdle was getting the cameras to dual stream properly, and it's not documented so upfront how to do that anywhere where I have searched and looked. ...-Hence this post, I'm more than sure someone has/will strain their brains trying to get that "dang secondary stream to work right!"

To Dual Stream properly with these cameras:
There is one well known Avigilon Camera Configuration Tool, the CCT, commonly used by anyone with an Avigilon camera. It's great, handy, and lets you make multiple changes quickly. -It won't help you when you need it most, in getting these megapixel cameras to dual stream efficiently with good keyframing at 1.0. You need to go into the Avigilon database/knowledge base and look for the "CIT", the oldie fashion Camera Installation Tool. With this invaluable tool / firmware repository, you select your camera, go to image and compression, and check the little box that says "Enable Second Stream". Once you do that, and let the camera readjust, It will present a weird, choppy split up image in BI, not to worry. You then go back into Blue Iris, Go to that camera's settings, click on the video tab, then the recording tab, and lick "OK", the view of the camera then shows the test pattern, then the image re-appears fine. It re-joined the camera's dual stream at the current camera rate. Now, go back into Camera Status above, and you will see: Image rates at 15, keyframes at 15, key ratios at 1.0. Works great. Flawless function. But it is near impossible to get this done without the Camera Installation Tool. Without it, you are stuck using only one stream that sucks up processing power and makes DeepStack completely top-out the processor at 100%. There is nowhere in the camera's interface to toggle this, nor in the CCT. It's only in the little known CIT app hidden deep in the Avigilon knowledge base through a poster's link. You can get the cameras to dual stream without using the CIT, but it's wonky and out of control with freezes and stalls in motion, not really useable.

Single stream then: Six cameras single stream 2.1 MP at 15 fps/15 keyframes / 1.0 key ratio, I would cruise at about 18% CPU, with maybe 2-3 alarms, it would jump to about 35%-40%, 5 simultaneous alerts would get to about 70%-80% with some glitches.

dual optimized streams now: six cameras at 2.1 MP PrimaryStream, SecondaryStream at about 10-40 kbps, both streams 15fps/15keyrames / 1.0 keyframe ratio, jumping to 30fps on alert record, 20 MB buffer, cruises at around 5% CPU, 2 alerts at 12%, and five simultaneous alerts around 20%-25%

Works better, but still not enough CPU for full DeepStack use. So I gotta wait for the Lenovo ThinkServer to get up and running.