Amcrest Blue Iris Professional Version 4 - Supports Many IP Camera Brands Including Amcrest, Zone Motion Detection, H.264 Compression Recording, E-Mail and SMS Text Messaging Alerts!

Blue Iris is feature rich and received widely recognition in the software based NVR community. The software is easy to operate and setup, feature complete and flexible to suit almost any need for most of home surveillance. The configuration is so loaded as to fully take advantage of it one should watch the tutorial video on it's dedicated tech support online community at iptalk.Comparing to most ip camera built in motion detection, blue iris employed sophisticated methods to allow a variety of motion detection approach to deal with noisy, small animal, lighting etc. caused false alarm situation that most camera are not equipped with its built in firmware. For example, zone crossing, size of object, number of pixel movement, highlighting the object detected, trigger a group of camera if one is triggered, sending alert to from mobile app push to SMS and email etc. these are only a few on its long list of capability. Lately blue iris has started to include AI object detection for a subscription fee.Blue iris is designed to run as a windows desktop application where most users keep it in a remote desktop session from a virtual machine or separate computer that's dedicated to it as it tends to be horsepower hungry. Its system requirement recommendation include i7 cpu and 16GB memory but you would be able to get by with i5 and less memory if video decoding is limited.With blue iris running on a remote computer, it also kept a web server broadcasting. Remotely access blue iris is available in both browser and mobile app ($10 for iOS) for viewing realtime view or alert triggered recording. Both are well designed though not as complete as the desktop blue iris itself but most of must-have functions are present.The video recording native to blue iris is not saved in mp4 or avi but stored in "bvr" (aac) file and rollover when reach size limit which can be set in configuration. Export to mp4 and other format as well as archiving to a different location including ftp can be setup in blue iris after reaches a number of days or file size limit. browsing to alert and recording in the past is easy in blue iris or browser and loading time is quick with SSD hard disk.All these good things with one single caveat the blue iris seems designed to suit a commercial NVR market, at least originally, where the surveillance is done with wired or PoE camera so the network throughput is relatively guarrantied. However, most of home surveillance who is set up with WiFi IP camera beware, the poor network condition inherited in WiFi network will leave blue iris much to be desired, especially when there are more than 3 cameras configured in blue iris.Blue iris is very sensitive to network condition, pocket drop out can cause camera connection in blue iris frequently go to dormant and disabled momentarily during the surveillance. If you still turn on the camera's built in motion detection and recording, often time I found the camera caught more trigger by itself than recorded by blue iris. That's an indication while the camera is live and connected to ftp server fine on the same network, blue iris however lost connection to the camera therefore unable to trigger or record.Frequent upgrade to capture more competitive features also rendered blue iris with some of the most obvious bugs shows little testing (regression) have been done. But if you're careful and stay in certain path when configuring the setting, it would crash less than otherwise. This leave a bit of worry if you're in a remote case unable to access the desktop when needed. There is an add-on "watchdog" that claims will be able to restart blue iris when it crashes.In sum, blue iris is a nicely developed NVR software with mature design and broad love from the users. It's probably suffer from small budget development and poor quality control practice to offer limited value to home WiFi camera surveillance setup at this point. Besides sensitive to WiFi network, integration with IFTTT or other home automation is not currently present except Amazon Alex. However, it's ideal to those who only have camera set up with wire. I only I wish I knew about this before invested into blue iris. Hopefully blue iris can spent effort to fix it and not made it sounds like an impossibility.

Blue Iris is not for the faint of heart as it has a ton of options and can be difficult to set up. But there are tons of internet resources for help. Look for and configure BI to use fewer resources as it can be CPU intensive. I was able to add my IP cameras and my DVR cameras to BI. I'm running BI on a Dell, with Intel 7 CPU with 16 megs of ram. Raid 1 with 6TB 7200 rpm hard drives. With 16 cameras, CPU running @ 20% and memory @ 4gb. Zero issues.After you get your software.. DON'T INSTALL IT! Go to the Blue Iris website and download their version. Install it and use the license that came with your order. Why? The Amcrest version is not updated often. The Blue Iris version is updated frequently. If you have already installed the software, you can download the BI version from their website and install it over the Amcrest version to get the updated.

The Blue Iris software is great!This Amcrest license blows....EVERY MONTH asking me for the registration key AGAIN and AGAIN.....Six months later, its asking me for the key again. I enter it, like every month prior... It tells me NOPE- this key has been used too many times!!!!!then, I google my issue.... and... this isn't a unique key...Total waste of money, $40 for six months of !!!!!!!!Avoid this license, get the REAL thing from Blue Iris DIRECTLY...THIS LICENSE IS NOT UNIQUE.IT IS GARBAGE.AMAZON should REMOVE this from the Marketplace

Prior to purchasing this software I was attempting to run my Brovotech/EZVIZ cameras using their onboard motion detection software, and honestly that was just about as bad as it gets. I got this software and once installed my life got much easier. Although the software isn't perfect, it's a very very solid product.Pro's - * Able to easily add cameras, and it supports many camera types. This includes specific models with built in profiles, as well as supporting more generic cameras using RTSP feeds like I use on 4/5 of my cameras. The remaining 1 is a Foscam that the software picked up and runs perfect. * Great level of control on alerting. You can custom set alerts of many types (email/text are the ones I use, others are available) per camera, and per camera profiles. * Speaking of which, you have 7 profiles to work from. I utilize three which I've names "work hours" "after work" and "night time" on the cameras. Each one has different motion alert profiles and settings, and slightly different alerting functions. * Motion detection is pretty good. The feature to correct for shadows is a must use, and the sensitivity settings are very scalable to help out the function of the units. The best thing is the granularity of the motion detection trigger zones, which can be custom set per camera, per profile. * Many many more pros, but I'm typing this at work.Cons * The programs controls do not always present themselves as refined as I think they should. While I haven't encountered anything that really was terribly difficult, there are many opportunity for non-techie people to get confused. * Speaking of confused, if you are using this software be prepared to Google. I had pretty good familiarity with the software pre-purchase and as an IT guy I had to ask the Google about a few tasks. * I think it would be really helpful if there was a wizard that let you define where you wanted to store the Database, and store the recordings as well as filling out default alert settings such as email and text. While I noted the many alert options as a pro earlier, I think it would be also helpful to have a default setting the software assumes and then you can change it. Many times I've forgotten to update the contact info in the alerts when updating a camera or setting up a new one.Random notes: * I think this should just be a digital delivery of the key since the actual software is downloadable. I recommend downloading the latest software from their website and then using the key from the package so that you don't have to run updates immediately. * Be sure that you have a pretty stout rig to handle the traffic if you are running multiple cameras --- especially HD cameras. And if at all possible that system NEEDS to be hardwired. There have been a few times that I've seen some stuff that I want to check up on, but not all the video data was saved because the wireless connection that the system used was overloaded.