Why not Luxriot?

[Linwood]

New house, new cameras. 
 
Long ago I used ZoneMinder (http://zoneminder.com) (http://zoneminder.com) (http://zoneminder.com), and modified it a bit, but got tired of fiddling with it.  Did a big search and chose Milestone Essentials+ (free for 8) .  Solid, nice, some limitations but reliable.
 
New cameras do not work well on Milestone (sure, should have checked first, hitting self on forehead...).  So back to searching. Xeoma and Blue Iris both look pretty good (both have advanced a LOT in the last several years), but both have some issues for me.
 
I stumbled across Luxriot.  Almost no one seems to talk about it, there are very few recommendations out there (for or against). I had seen it years ago, but at the time the free version was limited to HD resolution and even then I was higher. Now it is camera-count limited (9) and feature limited instead. It looks like a Milestone clone (or Milestone is a Luxriot clone). Same terminology, similar look and feel.  Seriously similar.  Must be a story there.
 
So far I like it a lot better Milestone.  Some better aspects: 
 
- No MS SQL (I'm a MS SQL fan, but embedded and installed-by-Milestone it was a pain to manage)
 
- Better (but similar) mobile client.
 
- Worked better with my Lorex cameras.
 
Some worse aspects: 
 
- Limited features including only one remote connection (web and mobile are each remote)
 
- Very high price tag if you need paid version.
 
yes there's a question in here....
 
Has anyone tried it?   Is there any reason NOT to use it, some downside I have yet to run across? 
 
It just seems really odd that what appears to be a very good product is so little discussed? 
 
Linwood
 

 

[pete_c]

First time I have heard of Luxriot.  I will give it a try on one of my Ubuntu servers.
 
Here it is understood about ZM. 
 
I have used it a long time and originally was using it with 8 chip video cards for analog to digital conversion.  Well then went to using Axis servers. 
 
Only replacement for ZM that I have looked at was Shinobi which I wrote about here on the CT forum.
 
Tested it here running it on one KODI box which was running Ubuntu 18.04 and on 24/7. 

 

[Linwood]

First time I have heard of Luxriot.  I will give it a try on one of my Ubuntu servers.

 
Luxriot is windows only.   :angry2:
 
It's one reason I keep coming back to Xeoma is that it's pretty OS agnostic, and runs nicely on linux.  

 

[pete_c]

Well then I guess I will not try it as I am shifting everything over to Linux these days.

 

[Linwood]

Well an update.  I got five 4K cameras running (slowly) on a real old laptop to test it.
 
On the good side -- Luxriot is AMAZINGLY fast at review.  You can scrub back and forth on the timeline and even with this wimpy computer it is nearly instant (most others are, for comparison on the same cameras and computer, 4-10 seconds to bring up any time on which you stop). Just amazingly fast, I have tried a lot of programs and it is incredible.  And the smart search (highlight an area and it shows where any motion occurred in it) is pretty good, basically the same as Milestone.
 
Now that bad news -- for a free version it is pretty much unsupported.  Not just by the vendor (most free do not really support their free versions), but no one seems to use it, there are no postings, articles, useful knowledge base articles.
 
So a couple days ago it just stopped working.  I THINK the server is running properly and recording, as it looks like it, but the viewer will not connect.  None of them -- android, viewer on the server, viewer on a separate desktop.  "method invocation caused exception".   No useful event viewer errors, reboot does not help, reconnect to the camera does not help.
 
It's just dead.  PROBABLY I could remove everything, wipe, and reinstall and it might work again.  Maybe not.   Maybe.  
 
But I think, despite how nice the fast viewing is, this one is going to be a punt.  Back to the search.

 

[Linwood]

So another update.  
 
I went back from Luxriot to a couple others, but kept banging my head.  Xeoma is a nice product (if you trust the russians) but is just plain flakey.  Blue Iris was my other choice, and has dramatically improved, and seems to be a viable choice, but had two big downsides for me: Performance is awful, compared side by side with every other tool.  I think I have enough horsepower, but it is a shame the performance is so poor.  But bigger deal is I have come to really like the after-the-fact motion search.  Highlight an area and have it show all the times there was motion in that area ignoring others.  Most other products have it.
 
Finally Blue Iris also did some really flakey things, notably as it got busy - just vanishing and no error message.  I decided if the go-to reliable product was unstable on my test platform maybe I was being unfair to Luxriot.
 
So I rebuilt an old tower to get it usable, added a pile of storage, and tried several products on it.
 
I just like Luxriot better.  Instant response is a thing of beauty.  And being free I can kind of think of this as a trial run for a few weeks.

 

[lanbrown]

Blue Iris has version 5.0 coming out around June of this year.  What it brings...not currently known.
 
I went from Windows Server 2016 to 2019 and noticed a drop in CPU usage using the same 4.8.x train of Blue Iris.

 

[Linwood]

I hope that V5 brings a serious rewrite to modernize.  There's a lot of stuff in BI now that just feels old.  I mean that from a development view, not talking graphics or style.
 
For example, I did a clean install on a virgin Windows 10 system and it died on startup.  It died because it requires C++ redistributables for BOTH 32 and 64 bit.  Now as a developer I have to wonder -- why does the install program not check?  When it's a known issue people are asking about in forums everywhere.
 
But also the 32 and 64 combined just sounds like a case of a migration to 64 bits never quite finished.  Which may or may not have any relevance to performance.
 
But some of the defaults are funky also.  For example, I was surprised to find on day 2 that I had no data over a few hours old.  Took a while to track down that it limits its storage by default to about 20 gig or so.  I guess I cannot fault it for having a limit (though most default to using all available), but the amount it defaults to seems awfully tiny for modern cameras and computers. 
 
None of these are serious issues, but it just "feels" like an old product that would benefit from a rewrite not to change function so much as to clean up, optimize, etc.
 
One I still want to try, but cannot seem to get a trial (their registration email never arrives) is Sighthound.  It purports to have MUCH better analytics and recognition, not just motion but "what is moving".  Reminds me, let me try again to get a code.

 

[lanbrown]

It could be that V5 he will go strictly 64-bit only.  Why Microsoft still offers a 32-bit OS is beyond me.  How old is the machine someone is trying to install it on.  Even Apple is going to get rid of all 32-bit support in the next macOS release.  Microsoft has gone 64-bit only on the server OS; which is what I run my BI server on.  There is no need to have 32 and 64 bit support and binaries in the OS anymore; time to go to 64-bit and leave the antiquated machines running an antiquated OS.  Seriously; how many people only have 4GB of RAM or less these days?
 
The biggest issue when something is allowed to consume as much space as it wants; bad things happen.  Data gets lost since it cannot save it anymore.
 
I typically like making another partition to store stuff on outside of the OS partition.  This way things can take 100% of the space and doesn't cause system stability issues; only stability issues with the app trying to save to that partition.

 

[Linwood]

I wasn't implying that it should USE all the space.  The three I've experimented with other than BI by default would consume all space but 20g or some percentage, and did a FIFO purge on the fly to keep from filling up.
 
You can make BI do that of course.  What I found interesting was really more the size of the defaults, not really so much that it would not default to whole drives.  
 
I just bought 4 x 4TB drives, to share between a backup NAS and video, and spent about $450 to get it.  And those were purple drives.