Fearless said:I ended up buying Blue Iris when I had trouble getting Milestone to completely work. Then I discovered Blue Iris eats up CPU resources. Went back to Milestone and got it working. It doesn't eat up CPU resources like Blue Iris. Can't beat free.
You may choose between AVI, Blue Iris DVR (.bvr), Windows Media (.wmv) or MPEG-4 (.mp4). Each format has its advantages.
When you choose AVI or Blue Iris DVR, you may select the video encoder (codec). Currently, you may choose from either H.264 (the default), MJPG (no temporal compression), or XVID if you have that installed from xvid.org.
The Blue Iris DVR format allows videos to be read and written simultaneously, as well as for videos to exceed 1GB, both of which are limitations of the AVI file format. The Blue Iris DVR format is also a highly-efficient flat-file format as opposed to the RIFF structure found in AVI files. You should consider using this format when creating large video files or when you need to access the video while it is still open for writing.
Certainly... and that's pretty much exactly how the Direct-to-disk option works too... the feed from the camera is recording directly to the HDD - hence the name.DELInstallations said:Interesting. Works different than any other VMS out there. Almost all break down the streams into AVI's and then store consecutive files. Generally about 4 min of video then the VMS strings the files together for the larger files.
Usually the timestamp is inherent to the codec and not a function of additional system settings. Part of why and how video can be used in law, due to the timestamp and fingerprint of the file itself.
DELInstallations said:That said, I don't think I like the BI codec way of doing it. Would have to see how the software actually functions. What form of back end? SQL?
I don't think so. For now I'm sticking with Milestone. I like the retrieval system more. One issue is slightly annoying though. Scheduling doesn't have a +- sunset/sunrise option.drvnbysound said:Did you enable Direct-To-Disc recording with BlueIris?
d.dennerline said:A VMS does much more than Hikvision camera recording software. The biggest feature is software can coalesce event and video data across all cameras. If you want to see what happened at 7:59 at your house, you can easily pull the video from all cameras. In addition, smart client viewer can show all cameras in the same screen.
If you have only 1-2 Hikvision cameras, then a VMS is probably overkill.
In addition, Hikvision cameras only support 64GB sdcard, so archival is restricted depending on your recording schedule. I did install a sdcard and configured my cameras to continuously record - just in case connection to server is lost.