Hmph... never knew. Sharing IP camera between 2 NVR's. How about that?

Holbs

Holbs

IPCT+ Member
May 1, 2019
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Reno, NV
Been running Blue Iris on a machine for personal use at my house for past 5 years with IP cameras all throughout the house here & there (20+).
At my place of business, Dahua NVR with 4 IP cameras.
VPN setup between house & work.

For giggles, I tried to add work IP cameras to my home Blue Iris through the VPN... and it worked! I never knew this was possible to share an IP camera between different simultaneous NVR's. Now can easily watch dumpster divers get too close to my back door on Blue Iris from home. Not too shabby of live streaming either. 0.5s delay in bringing up alert triggers, playback is smooth.
So I did all 4 cameras to Blue Iris under "office" tag. No issues.

So now the question... is there a downside to the cameras themselves of doing this? Bandwidth limitations? Overtaxing the camera CPU? Any 'gotchas' I should be aware of?
To be clear... the Dahua IP cameras at my office are sending Dahua protocol alerts/video to the office Dahua NVR + sending ONVIF alerts/video via VPN to my home Blue Iris, at the same time.
 
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Most recent (not over 5 years), name-brand IP cameras are capable of multiple RTSP streams without overtaxing the CPU; the max number of simultaneous streams is often stated in the specs and is usually no less than 3, IIRC, so you're good. :cool:
 
The bigger issue will be if your ISP decides that unlimited isn't really unlimited.

Sending one camera stream from my neighbor to mine got them a phone call within 3 days that IPC-LPR needed to be disconnected or they would cancel service.

The bigger concern was how the ISP knew the name of the camera....well we know how but wow.
 
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Yup, the only real issue is the bandwidth usage. Every 1 Mbps of bit rate is about 330 gigabytes of data every month. So this will probably put you in the top 0.1% of bandwidth users on both ends (both ISPs).

For 24/7 remote streaming, I recommend using very strong compression. E.g. 1 Mbps or less, variable bit rate, medium quality, 1-2 FPS. With an i-frame interval that is 4x the frame rate.

If you have Blue Iris at both ends, consider streaming a group view directly from one BI instance to another. If on a recent version of Blue Iris, use camera make: "Blue Iris". Here are some parameters that create an extremely low quality stream (about 63 gigabytes per month or less). /video/index/2.0?w=1280&h=720&stream=0&q=20&kbps=192&fps=1&audio=0&gop=4

1757369730365.png

And if you aren't going to record this group view, you should be able to increase the "gop" (i-frame interval) as high as about 1000 which will substantially improve image quality and reduce bandwidth usage.
 
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bp2008 said:
Yup, the only real issue is the bandwidth usage. Every 1 Mbps of bit rate is about 330 gigabytes of data every month. So this will probably put you in the top 0.1% of bandwidth users on both ends (both ISPs).

For 24/7 remote streaming, I recommend using very strong compression. E.g. 1 Mbps or less, variable bit rate, medium quality, 1-2 FPS. With an i-frame interval that is 4x the frame rate.

If you have Blue Iris at both ends, consider streaming a group view directly from one BI instance to another. If on a recent version of Blue Iris, use camera make: "Blue Iris". Here are some parameters that create an extremely low quality stream (about 63 gigabytes per month or less). /video/index/2.0?w=1280&h=720&stream=0&q=20&kbps=192&fps=1&audio=0&gop=4

View attachment 227687

And if you aren't going to record this group view, you should be able to increase the "gop" (i-frame interval) as high as about 1000 which will substantially improve image quality and reduce bandwidth usage.
Click to expand...
I'm with Spectrum Charter at both ends. Residential account & Business account. I see the stream profiles you made different. I will probably go that route if needed. Just waiting for Spectrum to yell at me first :)
 
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