Blue Iris

I wanted an outstanding box and didn't realize direct to disk eliminates the need for high powered GPUs for anything but display. Is that correct? I have a monster with 64 gig of RAM, SSD, RAID 10, and RAID 1 volumes, i7-5930K, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti.

The water-cooling fans, case fans and card fans are noisy as heck and the thing generates a lot of heat- and costs about $30 a month to run. I am not evening gaming on the box. It sure seems I am doing something wrong. I had to set all 9 cameras to always record continuously because I was missing alerts and needed to be able to find something that wasn't recorded the triggered way.

Is this a good box to run this, or can I peel it off to an HP EliteDesk with an i7 and integrated video. Thoughts? Will display playback suffer? I don't spend a lot of time watching the feeds... just not sure how to move forward.

I waited a year and tried about 50 combo configurations before posting this. I didn't want to bother anyone. What are your thoughts?

Hi captclam,

I waited a year and tried about 50 combo configurations before posting this. I didn't want to bother anyone. What are your thoughts?

This is the friendly forum. Ask anything you want. We may not know the answer - this being mainly a user to user forum - but we won't give you a hard time

My usual answer is to try it on the (old) pc you have, and then decide on updating the computer when it starts complaining, but you already have a powerful pc.

What resolution are your cameras ? My old i5-3330 is presently running at 22% cpu load with nine cameras on it. Seven of them are 1080, and two are old SD analogue cams. You can also look at https://biupdatehelper.hopto.org/default.html#stats to see what other BI users have running.

So:
1. Your present pc does sound to be overpowered. What is the cpu % load with all cameras running and viewing BI5 ?
2. Are you using hardware acceleration ?
3. D2D and sub-streams mean that even a weedy i5-3330 can play.
4. The HP Elitedesk may well be enough, leaving your main pc for other tasks. Add big hard drives.
5. Playback should be fine unless these were extremely high resolution cameras. (no info)

That sounds like a pretty large machine for your number of cameras but it should work just fine.

I have 17 cameras running at 15fps direct to disk (a few are 8MP but most are 2MP), with Intel GPU offloading and substreams for live view running on an Acer Aspire TC-780-UR11 Intel Core i7 7th Gen 7700 (3.60 GHz) 16 GB DDR4. I added a single 10TB drive for the footage as any footage I care to retain I can export to my NAS which is setup with RAID and the rest just gets overwritten after a few weeks.

One camera is a weather camera so it doesn't record or motion detect at all but sends a picture via FTP to an online weather service every minute. Three of the cameras record 24/7 and detect and alert on motion only when we are away and the rest record 24/7 and detect and alert on motion always. BI is also running the CPU version of DeepStack on the same machine.

The CPU is normally around 5% and the Ram around 30%, the CPU will go up to 30-40% occasionally on shadowy windy days were DeepStack is kept busy evaluating whether or not to alert based on preferences for each camera.

I've rarely had any issues with it, the machine locked up once and I had to reboot it, a couple of times I've had to help it during a reboot after security updates like when an external HDD was hooked up and it tried to boot from that. And once recently I had to reboot it because it was alerting on every motion detection rather than just those vetted by DeepStack as DeepStack wouldn't run even manually for some reason. The strange thing is the server I have setup for my parents at their house did the same thing the day before mine where DeepStack wouldn't run even manually, both had gotten Microsoft security updates and were waiting to be rebooted and the reboot fixed DeepStack in both cases.