Blue Iris Security Camera Optimizations You Need to Do 

How the crap did I miss that for the past 3 years. I had all the options set except the Don't encode unless needed on the camera setup. My 6 cameras went from 30% to 6% on an I7. You are the MAN!

Great video! Straight and to the point without the BS in between. My CPU usage went from the high 90-100% area down to as low as 3%. RAM was reduced from 4gig to 2.8gig. Awesome performance enhancement. Thank you sir.

This is pretty useful. I had already made a lot of these changes but it had not dug into the new camera interface much since then. Also, I knew about the keyframes but didn't understand them much. Your overview was very helpful! Good Job!

Great tutorial. Ive been running BI for years and never really understood these settings. Thank you very much for the insight!

I would like to see you do a walkthrough of the current version of blue Iris because I think your a good teacher and easy to understand !

Great video for those thinking about trying Blue Iris or even people like myself who have used BI for about 6 years now. Thanks!!!

This is absolutely fantastic, thank you so much for this. I'm looking forward to more about BI!

Best blue iris video out there! Hands down! I didn’t know about the sub streams! This feels like a whole new NVR! THANK YOU!

Excellent video thank you! I have been wanting to add the dual video profiles since upgrading from v4 to 5v back in November but didn't know where to start! After adding some of your tweaks my i7 with 13 cameras is purring along with 18%-22%. More videos on Blue Iris would be great! Thanx again!

As usual, your videos are the best! Nice and easy to understand, even easier to implement.

This video has been soo helpful for me! Thank you for making it. Currently I'm running 2 camera's on an NUC I5 with a CPU load of 2 to 5%. Before I watched this video it was 25 to 40%.

Thanks for a fantastic video. Learned a lot while getting my idle cpu down between 7 &24%. Please keep the videos coming

Loving it!! Thank you so much!

2023 and still very useful. Best straightforward explanation of sub streams. Now my 5 cameras use sub 15% of my CPU.

YES!!! Bring more BlueIris videos :) Yummy!!

That was a great video. Very clear explanation as always! I'm just starting out with Blue Iris with 4 Annke 4k cams on an old desktop. I'd love to see more videos on the topic.

ThNk you so much. This solved many problems of mine.

I forgot to leave a comment here as I used this before as 4x 4K camera's was utilising a lot of CPU time and my fans were powering up to full speed to compensate and figured it wasn't normal. A bit of digging and came across this and my CPU usage now idles between 9% to around 30% depending on what I am doing and if I am using the app on the server. Definitely a good tutorial as I am not a big fan of blueiris because it only runs on windows but had to make do with it as most linux alternatives aren't as well made and packed with so much options in tweaking settings per camera or as a system all together. One thing I definitely noticed is I ran this in evaluation before buying it and had it running on a single disk that was shared with windows os. Not a good move as the OS alone was doing things like updates, disk checking like you stated so to help things along I put windows on a virtual guest host on a linux server where the two primary linux boot disks are in raid 1 and the disks then used for the vm's are in raid 5 and found that the server doesn't hang, responds quicker and overall quality of the footage saved is clearer as it doesn't appear to be glitching. Overall read/write with a software raid 5 gave the server some oomph to move along. My plan is to move to intel xeon cpu's next as I am running a i5 2500k with 32gb ram and although it's not struggling I intend to add another 2 camera's and up the quality of the footage stored. The i5 is a very reliable cpu and has proven it can handle this task very well though.

Wow, this was incredibly helpful. Thanks for posting and keeping it under 20 mins. I’ll be following along now!

What a great piece of video hahah. Thank you!

I would love to see more BlueIris videos. Especial one on motion detection.

Please - more Blue Iris videos. There is much I need to learn.

Amazing! Thanks so much!

WTF! I was pricing new pc's today, because I didn't think I could add any more cameras to my current BI pc. Followed your first two tips about hardware acc and direct-to-disk, and cut cpu usage by more than half. I feel like an idiot, but thank you so much for this video! Haven't even finished it yet! RU-vid's algorithm got it right this time. You have a new sub. Thanks again!

WOW This helped me out BIG TIME :-)

Great video! If you select "Limit decoding unless required" as suggested, the program will reduce the live preview decoding of all cameras except for the one you last clicked on. This makes all the live streams look very stuttery except for one that is smooth. Caused me a bit of head scratching when I set that parameter on all my cams.

This helped a lot, I run 11 cameras and lowering the live frame rate really helped. Thanks

Yes! ...more videos...this one was great 👍

Awesome help, went from 28% down to 12%!

I like the weather overlay for blue iris being I am a weather geek !

Please, More Videos on Blue Iris, I have learnt so-much from this video, Thanks 😊

Quite helpful!

Fantastic tips! Thanks.

One of the best BI videos I've seen yet. Thank you!!!! Quick question - what version of BI are you running? We currently use 5.3.3.16 and there's no pulldown for the substream, I have to manually enter the parameters in. Not a big deal. Our subscription ran out and I'm waiting to renew until some features that I really need/want are in before I worry about upgrading.

Great video. I struggled on how to change the on my Reolink cameras. I won't be buying any more of them because they lack that capability. I read the entire 200+ page BI manual and still picked up several important tips. Thanks!

Great video as always. Are there any good resources for getting better motion detection out of BI? I am struggling with getting it to detect motion on some cameras (once I use the 640x480 sub for the motion) no matter how sensitive I put it.

I have definitly got to upgrade from 4 to 5. Currently, I am running Blueiris 4 on a Dell duel 6 core server. However, I am looking to merge some stuff together with virtualization. This would be the ticket along with a couple of cheaper Nvidia GPUs for plex and Blueiris acceleration.

Wow, that's a gem content! Thank you so much

Really nice video, i used to run blue iris, but found the cpu usage to be way to much for my liking, but with your tweaking seems you can drop lot of cpu cycles. Personally i moved to NxWitness, and im running 9x 4mp cameras on celeron J5005, idling at 20% usage.

Great video, I was ready to ditch BI, was able to get my CPU from 90% down to around 10%

And the trick with the reolink cameras and the 8999 to 8000. THANK YOU SO MUCH

This idea of using sub-streams is a real game changer! I am amazed by how much better my system operates now that I have done this with all 13 of my cameras. My CPU usage is now 18% versus the 95% it was prior to making these changes. The great thing about this is that you still view and record your videos in high res as long as you view them one at a time. On the grid layout they are low res but who cares? It has actually allowed me to now run some of my highest resolution cameras in Continuous mode (24/7 recording at your suggestion) and STILL my CPU usage remains incredibly low. I have now setup a Profile for several of my cameras to record 24/7 and switch to this when I leave my home. I have one off topic question related to this that I hope you can answer: I use Profiles but I do not want them to be started or stopped with a Schedule or timer. What menu choices would I have to make for my Profiles to be used manually? If you happen to know... and thanks again!

Great Tips👍 BlueIris is awesome love the huge bundle of features it offers. Only issue is the Android App feels buggy at times though the web interface on the other hand is great.

Great summary as always Digi! I strongly recommend that for surveillance, you should drop the FPS on the camera to 15 FPS, which is more than fast enough for motion detection and good recording of things happening. You don't need movie FPS to capture someone coming/going etc. I have 40 cameras, most are 1080p, about 10 are 2k-4k, on an i7-8th gen at 25% CPU :D

Thank you. 👍👍👍

Thank you!

also in Reolink camera setting turn on rtsp

thanks much. I'd missed some things as well and my CPU rate was through the roof!

Nice I dropped my 4 Camera system from 90-100 down to less than 20%. Truly Unreal. I have 2 x 8MP camera, 1 x 3MP and one 2 MP camera. I think I can now add an addition 8 MP camera.

This is a great video with lots of good up to date BI info. I recently did the sub-stream setup like yours and went from 98% CPU usage to under 25 % with 13 cameras in various configurations on an I7 processor. I'm a Mac guy but have the PC for BI and its a great setup. I have been using BI for years and love it but there are still some things that elude me: My motion settings to trigger any given camera seems unpredictable. I do not want to run cameras on 'full-time' but I also do not want to miss anything that enters the frame. The issue may be with Make time, Break time, etc. and some of those related setting. I wish I could find reliable settings for all of my cameras so that they will record for a given amount of time after the trigger and will re-trigger if need be without a long pause or downtime in between triggers. I need them to re-trigger quickly or what's the point? Yesterday the Fedex guy came and while reviewing the clip I saw him speaking with me at the front door for the 2 minutes that I had set it for. But then the recording stopped and it never re-triggered when he walked back to his truck and drove away. The camera caught nothing. I just can't seem to get this trigger setup to work predictably. A lot of people seem to have this same issue. Maybe you can do a video on this :) I'll keep my eye out. You do great work and you're a bright guy. Thanks again.

Thank you for this post. I shaved my CPU use in half.

More BlueIris videos would be awesome!!!

OMG - I've been using blue iris for a year and never tuned it - thanks man!

Another good video Travis...thanks...I thought about installing BI on a Windows virtual machine, or a NUC7 Pentium mini, with 8 Gb DD4 ram and 500 GB SSD...my cameras are all Reolink...your thoughts???

Man.. those sub streams.. I've been running blueiris for years with 100% cpu + 50% utilisation on a gtx1070.. this jst dropped it to 3%.. insane!! Thank yoU!

Love the videos, always so very thorough. I have been using bi for several years now and currently have 12 cameras (only 3 are ReoLink 410 cameras). These settings have made great improvements. But I still have not been able to get AI Tool working. Some advice would be appreciated. Ty

Please do a Blue Iris Video on Schedules and Profiles!

Yes to more BI, can you aim at the storage setup. how many days stored before deleting, things like that tks

Great video thank you.. What about the encoder setting that says "Resize output frame width x height: 1280 x 720 - what is this setting for?

After watching this video, my system went from 97% to 25% with no impact on the actual quality new recording BlueIris does. I have 12 cameras on Ryzen 7 1800x, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD for Windows OS and another 1TB SSD as main drive for BlueIris. Furthermore, offloading stored videos to 2x8GB WesternDigital. So i just wanted to say thank you for this video guide.

Incredible improvement. With these tips my CPU is below 20% and my system is extremely responsive.

Great tips. If BlueIris is running as a service and I minimise the GUI to the tray, do you know if it has the same effect as pausing the streams with the GUI visible (ie, will it still reduce CPU usage)?

9 cams from studdering 100% cpu to 15-22%. Memory 33% of previous values too. Thank You!

Hey, good choice of Camera and Software brand. I got both of the brands. But I am struggling to learn to use the BlueIris motion detection zones.. Do you know a quick a to rewind last 1 minute of the video when record continuously to see what happened? I do not need any triggers. I can do easily on the NVR but not sure in BlueIris.

Good info. For comparison, exactly what model Celeron were you using for these tests? I'm trying to find out if an i5-1235u with 12 cores at 1.5ghz is better than an i5-11320h at 4.5ghz with only 8 cores. Which is better, cores or ghz?

I need help with AI Tool

Interesting, I thought the point of the i-frame was to help the camera with processing. Each individual i-frame is a completely new picture correct? And each FPS is just an update of the last i-frame right? So I thought you were supposed to put the i-frame at double the FPS rate to help reduce the amount of processing the camera has to do. I would love to learn more about this stuff.

How did you get the labels on the imagery? I'm running DeepStack locally, I can turn on bounding boxes in the camera Trigger settings, I see the labels and probabilities in the clip annotations, but I haven't figured out how to get bounding box label percentage overlays in the video clips.

All my sub-stream shows as an option is default. No choices. If I try to use default, how do I know what to put to the right of it? I checked the camera ip page and sub stream is on at 265

The video on blueirys app is low resolution much worse than on camera native app Is there a way to improve this?

Whats it mean when your fps/key is at 0.50 for all cameras.

Any love for Zoneminder?

Has anyone had any good luck using WD Purple Surveillance drives (yes I know there 5400 RPM and not recommended) Or WD RED NAS drives also 5400 RPM.. I will likely never have more than 6 cameras.

I get this a lot and its on a 10gb Netowrk so there is no way in hell it should be telling me your network connection is not fast enough to handle this stream in real-time

More offline Ai blue iris videos

What matters: - Shutter speed - Pixel Density - Lens - good sensor for low light - Not a rolling shutter What doesnt matter (mostly): - FPS What cheap CCTV Cameras have: -High FPS -Poor shutter speed (and rolling shutters) -Terrible sensors for low light - Cheap lenses So cheap (and by cheap I mean under $500) CCTV cameras are great for a cheap home security setup to capture some blurry images of billy burglar and the local cats and to set off some alarms accordingly when a "person" or "cat" is detected in the image by AI. Forget doing meaningful facial recognition or ALPR with them. Explanation: Bit late but I work(ed) in professional security systems and the thing we rarely cared about was high FPS. Unless we were setting up cameras to capture very fast moving objects close too we would always run at 10FPS or less. For instance a car doing 60 mph is travelling at 26m/s so even perpendicular to a camera running at 5FPS a 60mph vehicle would still likely be seen on at least 5 frames. And coming towards or away will be in frame for many many seconds worth of footage, so we nearly always turned the FPS right down to preserve both bandwith and processing. What counts is not FPS but shutter speed. A low shutter speed will cause blur at any FPS. What you need is a high shutter speed camera (even at night - which needs a good lens and sensor), preferably at least 1/25th minimum for capturing people and 1/60th for vehicles at normal speeds. Most cheap CCTV cameras have awful shutter speed, especially at night - it's how they compensate for cheap sensors. You can improve this by using color illuminators for people detection and IR illuminators for ALPR..by lighting the scene brightly the camera will keep it's shutter speed up, but the cheap cameras still have a shutter lag and a rolling shutter - both very bad for detection. For detail for ALPR or facial recognition you need pixel density. So what counts is VERTICAL pixels per meter, or mm/pixel, at your chosen recognition range and ideally you want a camera/lens that will deliver about 3mm per pixel or better at whatever range from the camera you want to do facial recognition or ALPR and in a anamorphic aspect ratio. As a guide, a 2Mpix camera with a 6mm lens and a min low light shutter speed of 1/25th second will happily capture images for facial recognition and/or ALPR at a recognition range of about 15 feet running at 5FPS.

Changed my hardware decode to Intel and now Blue Iris crashes.

first row ?

I tried your tips but did not help.

Another video about this shit software...