3.2. Blue Iris
Security first
Mandatory reads:
- Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage (ipcamtalk)
- Follow everything on that page, up to (and including) Video scaling. The rest (Text and Graphic Overlays, Encoder Preset, Limit decoding unless required, Windows Power Options, Antivirus / Antimalware exception, Disk Defragmenter) hasn't been useful IMO.
If you don't have much experience with network security, I'd highly recommend running your camera in a closed system. For example, you could have a POE switch which the PC running Blue Iris and all the cameras are connected to. No Internet. You'd only be able to watch the live feed and recordings from the PC. Unless you get get your network secure, this is the way. If you're willing to spend a few hours reading on how to secure your network, here's a good start from ipcamtalk: How to Secure Your Network (Don't Get Hacked!).
Here's a short version:
- Disable uPnP on your router right now.
- Disable any Port Forwarding on your router.
- Use Tailscale. It lets you easily access devices on your network, and work securely from anywhere in the world. The free plan should be enough. You'll install Tailscale on the Windows machine running Blue Iris and on the clients wanting to access UI3.
- Make sure to take a look at their not-so-marketed Community on GitHub plan which can get you up to 25 users, 5 devices per user, and 2 admins for free.
If you use UI3 a lot (eg: you leave it run most of the day on a monitor), I'd highly recommend lowering the FPS of the groups stream. Groups are displayed above the live view and the default value is "All camera". You can create groups of cameras and new layouts. Next to the "All cameras" dropdown, you'll see a cog ⚙️. Click on it. You'll then see a "Default max FPS" box. I set it to 5 and immediately noticed a significant drop in CPU usage.
Our setup
We have a cameras system of 100MP/s.
The Clips and archiving is configured as following:
- New: Secondary HDD, 200GB, 7 days, then moved to storage
- Stored: Secondary HDD, 1TB, 120 days, then deleted
- Alerts: Secondary HDD, 200GB, 30 days, then deleted