Blue Iris with 30 Cameras

[Laaazz]

Hi guys,

 

I have a requirement where the site needs 25-30 cameras installed. 

 

Cameras will be recording at 2MP at 10FPS with H265 encoding, will be configured to write directly to disk, and will handle the overlays.  As the CPU won't be doing any decoding, should a Kabylake Celeron with 2C/2T be enough? 

 

Also, I'm planning to install 4 hard drives, each storing 1 zone.

 

 

 

 

[voyager_]

I don't think that CPU would be enough, Im running 12 camera with direct to disk and a gtx950 for decoding to assist. When you start adding motion sensing, remote viewing, windows recources, etc I dont see that cpu being able to manage very well. Im running a ryzen 2700x 6c/12t(running in a vm to its cut down to 5c/10t) and tend to sit around 20-30% with blue iris running in background as a service. When you access remotely the cpu may get to 60-70% depending on the quality/number of cameras being viewed. overlays do add to the cpu usage my a noticible amount, not crazy though. I dont recall what the increase was when I enabled mine.

 

With that many cameras I would look at a cpu with atleast 6-8 cores to be safe. There is a blue iris facebook group that may be a better option then the LTT forum (please dont shame me for this comment) you will probably find people with similar setups that can provide a better idea of the system specs needed.

 

Based on blue iris page for system req. the MP/s for those cameras is 21 * 30 (number of cameras) * 10 = 6,300 cpu mark. without knowing the exact cpu sku that your looking at I can't give you the exact passmark score but that general sku seems to be approx 2,500ish.

 

Hopefully that helps, Blue Iris is a great program and you may want to look into Deep Stack at somepoint. It adds some useful AI features

[wseaton]

I run 25 cameras at 2mp on a 10yr old e1225 Xeon and 30% cpu utilization. Only a couple cams have motion detect, and that takes up most of the cpu utilization except for recencoding.  I prefer constant record unless I need event driven recording anyways. 

 

25 cameras at 10fps and H265 will produce less than 2MBps data at a moderate/low quality level and VBR. Under most normal or daylight conditions low quality setting on a modern IP cam is more than sufficient. Only needs to higher under maybe night viewing to help with noise reduction. 

 

Refurbished PCs like i7s and even i9s are cheap..slap a couple big HDs in them and they make terrific Blue Iris servers than can effortlessly host dozens of cams.

 

GPUs only assist with re- encoding. Like, converting direct to disc to playable clips. For the actual recording your GPU doesn't matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Laaazz]

Thanks for the insights.

 

I'll probably only use motion detect on 4 cams, and the rest will always be recording so I don't expect heavy CPU utilization. I do have an old 4790k which I was planning to run FreeNAS on, but I guess I'll use that instead.

 

As for the GPU,  is this required for a live feed?

[voyager_]

Im running an AMD based system so I need a gpu regardless but the cameras are set to use it for decoding and I use it for deepstack