Hi,

Wish list as don't think this can be done but strikes me as something not that hard to implement.

Is there any way to play a saved clip and have BI act upon it as if it was real time direct from a stream.

Testing & Tuning is pretty good but no way to really combine the two so a trigger, then alert. testing & tuning does pick up I think a lot more than when in real time as doing one at a time, either AI or Tigger

I am trying to trigger on a car A>B then AI check for licence plate & then get the plate number.

Testing with a real car IN & out, different levels of light/night, weather, speeds & small angle differences is impossible.

Appreciate might be slightly different as perhaps not encoding in the same way but would think pretty close.

Would be great if there was an option to select a file under Video or perhaps some way to emulate a stream from a device IP that is playing back a file.

Thanks I/A

How many monitors do you have on your system?

Hi,

It's an interesting idea to play a saved clip and have your surveillance system, such as BI (Blue Iris), act upon it as if it were a real-time stream. While this functionality might not currently exist in the software, it's definitely a concept that could offer valuable benefits for testing and tuning your surveillance setup.

Combining saved clips with real-time triggers and alerts could enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of your surveillance system, especially when testing different scenarios like car movements in varying light and weather conditions.

Implementing such a feature would likely require some adjustments to how the surveillance software processes and interacts with video streams. It may involve developing a playback feature that mimics the behavior of a real-time stream, allowing triggers and alerts to be activated as if the footage were live.

While this idea may present some technical challenges and require careful consideration of encoding and playback methods, it's certainly worth exploring further. Perhaps reaching out to the developers of BI or other surveillance software with this suggestion could spark interest in implementing such a feature in future updates.

Thanks for sharing your idea, and best of luck with your surveillance testing and tuning efforts!

Best regards,

...

Hi,

OP here, SOLVED (I think)

Fairly sure I have a good/great solution but minimal testing so far on this particular setup.

I tried everything, thought about the screen capture but only have one monitor and I figured I could capture a window with the other settings, UScreenCapture etc etc. just never got it to work at all.

Then thought can you stream a file to an IP, yes you can, VLC makes it easy, struggled to get it to work well enough, was pretty good, but could be quite jittery and when relying on similar flowing stream to identify AI & movement just not reliable enough, start stopping with lag also made it difficult. Tried dozens of re-encoding, bitrate, fps, size formats. Never really worked well enough.

Always tried localhost to locahost, same PC as BI. also & did most of my testing from a fast PC, good GPU over LAN to the BI PC, still pretty fast but average GPU.

Then next rabbit hole (but came out the end with a result)
ffmpeg. I understood to be more lightweight but extremely capable.
But even with ffmpeg I just could not get it to stream to VLC or BI, now I have found a solution not sure why as sure must have gone over this many times.
It would stream perfectly to FFplay, over the LAN but & this may have been my mistake, I tested receiving mostly on VLC & never got a picture, did not go on to test BI.

=== SOLUTION === (Should have put at top but after some sympathy for all the banging my head against the wall.

Blue Iris :
Export clip, fairly sure I used default, did not change anything else, just checked .MP4 (seemed best option)
The .mkv is because I joined (appended) two clips using AviDeMux (new to me but easy enough) so I had a "nothing happening" clip with the "action" one so BI movement detection had time to settle, Pre-trigger etc. avidemux default save to this container so left it as is.

UPDATE : don't use avimux much now, unless I want to join but just export BI & config to save at 768x576 this is a good size stream & guess closer to perhaps the sub stream that often AI & motion is detected on.

ALSO whilst initially I had quite a lot of luck with it was running as a service, for some reason, recently could be a real pain, without a PC restart & trying to stop & start a new ffmepg if often would not get the stream again.
Just for testing, running BI NOT as a service was MUCH more reliable.

BI Camera settings : http, NOT UDP here
http:// 192.168.2.2:44000 - Once had trouble with 8080 so picked a random high number (divisible by 4, BI help, not sure relevant here)
Generic/ONVIF
MultiCast (UDP)

on my main PC, 192.168.2.2, cmd with admin
ffmpeg -re -i eGate768.mkv -an -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -f mpegts udp://192.168.2.5:44000?pkt_size=1316
192.168.2.5 is the BI PC

ffmpeg for windows etc, readily available & easy install although you have to manually put it in the PATH, I put all files in c:\ffmpeg, even copied the video files for ease.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-in ... n-windows/

Not sure need the pkt_size now but was advised when VLC would not play, did not help VLC
not too sure on all the setting, I have tried so many.

just having a few issues but will post this anyway ..

Not too much of a problem but BI can error,"Fatal error attempting to reconnect to local service" & needs restart. Can be OK without windows restart but a few times it would not get the stream again, until I did.
Seems fickle but once connected & you keep a stream going, even if you stop ffmepg for a few seconds to run a different video, it is really solid.
restart camera can help, toggling decoder compatibility mode worked for me just now, on at moment.

So I loop this non movement video always,
ffmpeg -re -stream_loop -1 -i blank768.mp4 -an -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -f mpegts udp://192.168.2.5:44000?pkt_size=1316

then stop ffmpeg, Crtl Break, ready with paste of the video I want to test & run again.

still testing if to just stop after playing this or run the blank again.

ref. CPU usage
for me only 6%, CPU i7 37000, think GPU may be taking the strain, nVidia 1060ti on 34%
as this is the sending PC no matter, the important thing is the BI PC is not really under abnormal strain.
I do run all this using google remote desktop to access the BI PC and no slow down on either as far as I can tell.

...