upstatemike
Senior Member
I'm looking for the best strategy going forward for monitoring security cameras. Currently I run Blue Iris at my desk with a large monitor giving me a nice view of my 6 main camera feeds. Any time I am at my desk and I hear a voice alert from the driveway sensor or doorbell I can just glance up quickly and see what is going on so I can decide how to react. This works really well but I need to extend that same experience to other locations in the house where I am likely to be much of the time (bedroom, kitchen, workshop, etc.) so I'm trying to decide the best strategy to accomplish this.
The biggest requirement is that the streaming video needs to be available instantly when I hear an alert. A solution that has to be turned on, switched to, or in any way manually brought up is going be too slow to catch what is going on. I know this from experimenting with cloud cams and Echo Show and other options where the camera stream is not already being delivered to the viewing device when you need to look at it. Some of the options I am considering are:
1- Distributing the existing video from my Blue Iris server over some sort of Cat5 splitter/extender device. (The wiring could be difficult to some locations)
2- Get a bunch of 10 inch Fire tablets from Amazon and run Tinycam or something similar to directly display the camera feeds (Not sure how many feeds each camera can serve or what this would do to my Wi-Fi)
3- Use Fire tablets and some sort of HA software to give me a control surface and let the HA software automatically switch to the camera stream view when a driveway detector or doorbell is triggered (Not sure what HA platform will support this and deliver a live stream instead of a snapshot. Also not sure that the camera stream could be brought up any faster than the Echo which has already proven unacceptable. I guess the cameras would need to be streaming to the tablet all the time and the trigger just brings the video screen to the top.)
Any other options I should consider? Anybody have experience to promote or rule out one of the options above?
The biggest requirement is that the streaming video needs to be available instantly when I hear an alert. A solution that has to be turned on, switched to, or in any way manually brought up is going be too slow to catch what is going on. I know this from experimenting with cloud cams and Echo Show and other options where the camera stream is not already being delivered to the viewing device when you need to look at it. Some of the options I am considering are:
1- Distributing the existing video from my Blue Iris server over some sort of Cat5 splitter/extender device. (The wiring could be difficult to some locations)
2- Get a bunch of 10 inch Fire tablets from Amazon and run Tinycam or something similar to directly display the camera feeds (Not sure how many feeds each camera can serve or what this would do to my Wi-Fi)
3- Use Fire tablets and some sort of HA software to give me a control surface and let the HA software automatically switch to the camera stream view when a driveway detector or doorbell is triggered (Not sure what HA platform will support this and deliver a live stream instead of a snapshot. Also not sure that the camera stream could be brought up any faster than the Echo which has already proven unacceptable. I guess the cameras would need to be streaming to the tablet all the time and the trigger just brings the video screen to the top.)
Any other options I should consider? Anybody have experience to promote or rule out one of the options above?
