Blue Iris

Hi all.

I was a registered user back in 2017 and went away from Windows to Linux and used something else. In recent weeks I have been again playing with BI and it has some features I like so fired up a windows machine and back to using it. I have to upgrade my lic to 5 but its looking good.

I have some questions or after some suggestions. I run Homeassistant as my home automation. I have a partner that has D.I.D or multiple personality disorder so a lot of my automations etc are based around assisting her with that. Some are purely security related but my current solution interatcs with HA via URLs etc and I am looking at converting them to BI hence my questions. I use Node-Red for all my automations and a lot of MQTT

1. Currently I have the ability to have text saved as part of my videos. Just like a time stamp but I can change the text using a URL call. Like http://utl.to.video/http_marking?module ... rams=Front door=open and in the corner of the video it prints that. IS there a way or an alternative someone can suggest that?

2. in my old cctv I have my internal camera setup to record only when we are away and the house is unoccupied. Ok I know I can do that with profiles and I think you can change which profile is active via web call so that parts fine. However I was looking at doing a profile for the outside cameras for Day and Night (I should say 2 profiles. So to also have one that turns on the camera inside etc attached to the outside profiles I would need

Outside day inside off
Outside night inside on
Outside night inside off
outside night inside on

Does that seem correct or again other suggestions?

3 I will feed MQTT to my home assistant but I have seen a few questions about signaling BI via MQTT. Is that something likely to happen?


4 I have been playing with the AI and its ok. I have a vehicle parked that doesn't get driven very often. What would one suggest to monitor that one car and be notified if it moves? I was looking at just putting it in a zone by itself but that would obviously
it requires it to be parked exactly in the same spot and that can work for us but again any other suggestions? We are just looking at detecting it being moved out of that area?

BI looks like its going to be my main system. Currently runnning my old one on another machine as a backup for now till I get the motion detctions of BI fed into my home automation but its looking very good.

Thanks all

I don’t know about the text overlay but I thought I recall something about overlaying weather so maybe it is possible. You can send a “memo” to a triggered camera and it show the note in the list of triggered events.

You can send MQTT messages in both directions. If you’re running HA, I would think it’s the best way to handle it. Scroll down this page and you’ll see some of the possible commands. The BI manual also has details. You can set cameras/groups to manual recording for your desired away/day-night recording. As well as active profiles, etc.
https://wiki.instar.com/Software/Window ... STAR_MQTT/

So here’s where I ended up on this. The SD streams are continuously recording. When motion triggered, they start taking snapshots to a folder and send an MQTT message to HA. Depending on the camera and time of day, HA will turn on various lights if a camera sees any motion (e.g. someone walked into the garage). It doesn’t wait for AI detection because I want it as responsive as possible (e.g. the door is swinging open).

My BI computer is also running Windows Docker running DeepStack AI. It analyzes the snapshots for configured objects. If detected, it sends an MQTT message to HA what it found in the snapshots. If that message has objects of interest (plus some other filters) it sends an MQTT message to trigger an HD recording. The cameras run enough of a buffer to deal with that sub-second process. I attach a memo of the objects AI seen in the snapshot. It would seem possible to mask a camera snapshot to look for a car and always take the snapshot and report to HA. Then create a HA flag for “car here/away”. Or something like that.
https://github.com/danecreekphotography ... ai-trigger

Only mild annoyance with my setup right now is only the last memo sent of a trigger window is saved. So it may only show “Car” when if I look at the triggered recording there were people, dogs, sheep, a horse, an umbrella, and a bicycle . They just left the frame before the last triggered Snapshot. It looks possible to collect the objects detected and join them for release when the motion clear message comes in, or timeout. Just haven’t got to that yet.

secs wrote: ↑Fri Dec 11, 2020 9:27 pmI was a registered user back in 2017 and went away from Windows to Linux and used something else.

Just out of curiousity, was it Zoneminder?

I tried Zoneminder a couple years back. It has promise, but the interface was both primitive and confusing and I never could the kind of display I wanted.

Thanks All for the replies so far.

After I posted the question I did find the mention of MQTT being able to control BI so that one was my lack of looking.

I have enabled SmartSentry AI and am playing with that for now but I do run an Unraid server and have a deepstack docker installed but havent played with it yet. That may answer one of my new questions. I too use the motion in BI to fire up the lights etc via MQTT and node red in Home Assistant. I have been whilst playing had the email alerts waiting for the SmartSentry reply before sending the emails and most likely will turn off the email alerts unless we are away. I was looking for a way to send another alert to HA/NODE-RED after the initial movement status once Smart Sentry has said it was a human etc. Maybe I can use Deepstack.

And as for what I used on Linux? It was Xeoma