Best way to add another monitor

[aleitt99]

Hi all,
I am in the process of replacing my old nvr with ip cameras and BI. I am new (and late) to the IP camera scene so I have a question.

My current set up is an older Amcrest nvr. It has HDMI out as well as vga. I have the nvr located in my home office, but I have another monitor in my living room. I have a vga to ethernet adapter at the nvr and the monitor with about 60 feet of cat5e connecting them so I can view the 4 cameras from the living room. The hdmi output goes to the TV in the office.

I would like to use a similar monitor set up with the new blue iris install. I will have 4 to 6 cameras running on a dedicated i5 pc. The pc will be in the office, and I would like to still view the cameras from the living room monitor as well as from the office.
Would it be best to use a similar set up splitting the video output, or use a web interface with something like a raspberry pi in the living room ?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

[TimG]

Hi, my preference is to use UI3 on 4k firesticks (wifi) with all of my remote televisions at the moment. That gives me the ability to choose an individual camera, or view a recording, as well as see all cameras at once. I have this working with the Silk browser on the firesticks, as it has a useful mouse function. Silk is set to ONLY do UI3, so it pops up as soon as I start Silk.

[aleitt99]

Thank you ! I didn't even think to use the firestick silk browser. Honestly I didn't think it would work for anything other than downloading apk's to sideload.

I haven't played with the UI3 so I didn't know how versatile it could be. I have a Raspberry pi 4, Fire Stick, and a cheap android tv box. I am going to try it on all 3 just for the heck of it. With the Pi, I think I could just leave it running
all the time, and only turn on the monitor when needed, which is usually all day. Probably could do the same with the firestick ?

Mark

[TimG]

I have also sideloaded Silk onto my Nvidia Shield, and UI3 works well there too.

It's not quite as good as a proper browser and mouse, but you can review all of your old recordings. If you attempt to use the Silk circle pointer to scroll down the left hand list as usual, it won't work. The work around is to start one from the list on the left hand side, then if you look at the bottom left, the volume control will now have < and > buttons next to it, so you can now keep pressing < to see the previous recording. Not perfect, but good enough !

If you delay in between pressing <, it will pause instead of showing the previous recording. Wait a second longer and press < again. Sorted.

As we say in the UK, perfection is the enemy of good enough

[brcarls]

Silk is set to ONLY do UI3, so it pops up as soon as I start Silk.

How did you do this? I can't even figure out how to change the home screen in Silk.....

also, the side bar in UI3 with profile selection won't go away. On desktop browsers, if you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, you get a pop up which allows you to go full screen or dismiss the sidebar, but I don't get that in Silk on my Firestick.

[atreyu]

At risk of sending you down a new rabbit hole, you can also pull the streams from BI onto a Home Assistant dashboard. So then you just need a way to pull up an HA dashboard in a browser (RPi, etc.).

Here's one of the configs

camera driveway:
- platform: mjpeg
mjpeg_url: http://192.168.1.XXX:YYYY/mjpg/dw
name: Driveway
username: BIuser
password: password
authentication: basic

Then you can delve into controllable lighting, grabbing 433MHz transmissions of weather stations, door/window sensors, PIR motion sensors. Then put overlays on the cameras of light status, Deepstack detections, and weather data. Then also trigger lights to turn on for BI triggers, door sensors, and PIR sensors.

[TimG]

How did you do this? I can't even figure out how to change the home screen in Silk.....

I saved it as the only bookmark. I can't remember if there was another step after that, I just had a look arond the menu's, and I can't see anything else

[YrbkMgr]

Hi, my preference is to use UI3 on 4k firesticks (wifi) with all of my remote televisions at the moment. That gives me the ability to choose an individual camera, or view a recording, as well as see all cameras at once. I have this working with the Silk browser on the firesticks, as it has a useful mouse function. Silk is set to ONLY do UI3, so it pops up as soon as I start Silk.

FWIW, there is a mobile FireTV Stick Remote app for Android and iOS that allows your phone to act as the remote - that means keyboard and speech to text capabilities. So entering a password or whatever is done from the keyboard instead of "hunt and peck".

Are you using the stick/UI3 on dedicated monitors? I can see it as a wireless monitor connection so you might put an extra monitor in the kitchen, for example - dedicated to UI3. But I can't see the value of putting it on, say, your living room or bedroom FireTV Stick. Since you can only view 1 app at a time on the stick, you have to stop whatever your watching and open the Silk browser. When do you do that?

In my situation, if I'm watching the stick in the living room and get an alert, it takes an eon to open the app on the stick - farking around with the remote and such. Seems to me it's easier to monitor on my phone, desktop, or another dedicated UI3 monitor. So I'm asking for an example of how you use it on the stick.

FWIW, I have old mobile phones placed all over the house so I can monitor anywhere. It's the best use I've found for them. Sadly, Apple won't let me use my iPad 2 anymore - that would have made an excellent use of that as well...

[TimG]

This is a really simple set up. There are five televisions with 4k fire sticks, and my main projector connected to a shield and a pc. Using Silk browser (which has a mouse/cursor function) with only UI3 bookmarked, they open on UI3 if the browser is opened. Silk allows me to move a cursor around the screen to select things. Basic but functional. No Alert causes this or that malarkey.

I did have another thread where I was hoping to get Ken to write a "leanback" version of the android app for android tv devices, but the response was not enough to get things moving. That would be much better than this UI3/Silk method, but this is much better than sideloading the normal android BI5 app only to find you can't do anything with it. Yes, I've been there.

[YrbkMgr]

they open on UI3 if the browser is opened.

No Alert causes this or that malarkey.

I don't think I'm asking my question right. To be clear, I am asking you this question "If it's not in response to an alert or some notification, When/Why do you open the browser on the stick?" If it's not for an alert, why would you decide to open UI3 on the stick in the first place?

I know how to use Silk and have tons of experience with the mechanics - had it up with UI3 many, many, many, times. But unless it's a dedicated BI client for viewing UI3, I can't see how viewing UI3 on the stick is an advantage. Maybe I'm not connecting the dots out of naiveté, but I can't envision a use case for UI3 on a stick - unless the primary purpose is to make the stick a dedicated BI client.

Please know, I'm just trying to figure out if there is an advantage for me that I hadn't considered. So I'm trying to get clarity on why you like the feature.