Blue Iris

I am currently trying out Blue Iris on the demo mode. I've been using GeniusVision CE (GV) for a while now, but the RTSP connections to my Wyze cameras keeping stopping and GV will not restart the stream. Blue Iris seems to accomplish this well and in fact is far more stable with RTSP than GV was.

My Blue Iris setup is installed on a Windows 2008 VM which seems to handle the application fine... when the window isn't open. I've configured my cameras (8 RTSP H264 feeds and 3 HTTP feeds). When I have the window minimized, my CPU hovers around 54%. However, when I open the window and leave it open (in order to monitor my cameras on an external monitor), the CPU usage shoots up to almost 90%. With GV, I was getting 60% all the time whether the window was open or not. I realize that having video display may require more processing power, but is there a setting of some sort that I have missed where it is maybe encoding the video for the screen instead of just showing a scaled version of the video?

I'm looking at other alternative such as a Fire Stick and an external PC with the web browser (which I have running well on a tablet right now), but was hoping to reduce network traffic and utilize the video connection I already have established.

I'm otherwise loving the product and will likely purchase it at the end of the demo.

Try putting in an additional graphics card. I've done it often as it can reduce strain on the CPU by not using the onboard graphics.

In Blue Iris (not camera) Settings under the Cameras tab there is an option to Limit Live Preview frames per second. Mine is set at 20 fps. You might want to play with that a little bit to see if it makes a difference. There are a boatload of tips for limiting CPU usage in the help file - under Administration, CPU Usage oddly enough

If BI5 is similar to BI4, then there was a setting for that. I think the BI4 demo also prevented you from recording direct to disk too, which also puts up CPU loading.

OK, have a look at the general settings/ Cameras. In there is "Limit Live Preview rate ( Does not affect recordings)" which may help.

Let us know how you get on

There are a lot of options to help with this now. Limit Live Preview certainly but more so the Substreams and possibly some hardware decoding depending on your CPU. You could also be pushing your FPS higher than needed. Most find anywhere in the range of 10-15 is perfectly acceptable. Yes it will not be super fluid motion but generally this isn't meant to be recording movies but just security footage... 15 fps is still pretty darn good.