Blue Iris

Hi all,
I am working on getting my boss to allow me to purchase a more powerful system, but for now I'm having to work with what's available to me. We've been using BI on an older i7 (I don't have the system in front of me but it's either a 3rd or 4th gen) - it works OK, but (obviously) it can't handle a lot of cameras. I'm trying to stretch a bit more life out it (the sins of working for a school) - I have some spare Nvida quadro P620 cards. In the past I remember BI was able to use Nvidia for graphics acceleration (although was frowned upon due to the higher power requirements), but I wasn't sure about the current version.

You may ask why not just try - well, we're limited to a slightly older version of BI right now (still in the 5.x chain, but pre-BI using the substream for processing). I was hoping with an updated version I might:

- use substreams for motion detection, or use ONVIF triggers to reduce CPU load
- record audio (for some reason we've always had trouble getting the audio from Amcrest cameras into BI)
- use 1 or 2 Quadro P620 to do some of the decoding to reduce load on the iGPU which is way dated at this point

and through those bullet points be able to get a few more cameras on the system before it gets over loaded.

So I'm clear - we already use D2D, turned off any overlays within BI, disabled motion detection (overloads the machine with the cameras we have), cameras are all set to 15fps or less, 1560p/1440p amcrest and hikvision cameras.

Ultimately I want us to get 1 or 2 i9 based systems but getting budgeting isn't easy, so I'm stuck with what I can get my hands on.

So if you have the Quadro's sitting around, there's not much loss in trying them other than some spent time. In theory if they don't help you don't have to even take them back out (one maintenance window??) as you can just disable their use.

If you're able to just update the BI software version to make full use out of substreams you will likely see a huge improvement. The amount of processing load that is relieved with that is tremendous at the expense of a LITTLE added network bandwidth and some storage implication. Is there a reason you're "limited to a slightly older version of BI right now"? Is it just a license renewal issue?

Pretty much - I've donated a few licenses in the past, and it would be another donation currently, but money is just tight right now :/ I could always wait until next month to get the update as we do have another open source solution just recording all cameras with no processing being done right now; but I really like BI's app, the main GUI and web interface, I've only reduced its use due to lacking of hardware power to handle the 30 cameras we currently have in place.

And yes, I have quite a few quadros p620's (kinda low end units, but don't require additional power which is convenient and definitely more powerful then the gen3 i7 igpu) laying around from when the CAD class received updated systems and I recycled their old systems for other classes.

I see you're using a Xeon based system for your BI. I had considered moving mine over, but my one spare (HP DL360 w/ 2x Xeon E5-2530 (12 total physical cores) is much lower powered compared to yours plus I don't have a lot of 2.5" drives for video storage and without quicksync on the xeon I figured the performance would be... lack luster.

I'm not sure that it helps a ton in this situation but since you brought up my system, I'm actually running on a DL180 G6 (so old) that I found on ebay for $200 - no hard drives. The DL180 was perfect for my situation because.... it does not use the 2.5" drives. It has 14x 3.5" SATA/SAS bays! Drives I had so that was an easy win. The server originally came with older CPUs but I looked up specs and upgraded to nearly the max supported (the ones I'm using) via another ebay special - I think I spent $20 for 4 physical CPUs. I don't need 4 but figured it gave me fallback incase some were DOA being used, luckily the first two I tried were great. While you may still be stuck on the storage situation, depending on the generation of your DL360 you too might be able to upgrade CPUs for super cheap. I can definitely confirm my system supports Intel hardware acceleration within BI.

It definitely adds complexity but you could possibly use the horsepower of the DL360 and use network storage (ie... your current system) for 'stored' video. Looking at CPU comparisons, I don't think ours are that different and yours are 2 years newer.

All this to say, I feel you. While my system isn't for a school, I am not granted deep pockets by the boss (ie wife) for this. My system runs though quite happily around 7-10% CPU.