Ready to add outdoor camera's to my Vera Lite

Other Devices & Integrations Door Locks & Sensors
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Hello Everyone,

I have been running my VeraLite now for about 6 months with reasonably decent success. I have about 30 devices and 20 scenes and so far so good, not perfect but acceptable. It may now be time to add some eyes to my system. Have read just about every post in this section and I’m fairly settled on buying 4-Hikvision bullet camera’s (POE) and using Blue Iris for image capture and the Blue Iris plugin to Vera.

My main goals here are, motion sensed recording day and night, remote access to recordings, notification on my iphone with an image, camera’s acting as motion sensors to trip scenes, ability to see all camera’s remotely.

I’m sure I will find more cool things I can do but for now that’s what I’m after. Am I on the right track with this…? Are there any suggestions or pit falls the experts can help me avoid or are there things that I will find are not possible.

Thanks all…

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Don’t put cameras in VERA (especially a LITE) just slows you down.

What notification setup do you use for the Crapple that has image notifications? I use VERA alerts on Androids.

BlueIris is great, need a good processor (computer) or you’ll max out cpu.

I removed the Blueiris Plugin (Remember your on a LITE which is lite on RAM) I used the Virtual Motion Sensor plugin with child devices for each camera to get the motion into VERA without the picture.

I switched out all my foscams for the Hikvision 3mp poe. I have some Bullets (best versatility) but I do have some domes with the same specs. Never tried turrets but wanted to.

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See Commets in the quoted section

[quote=“integlikewhoa, post:2, topic:188677”]Don’t put cameras in VERA (especially a LITE) just slows you down. COMMENT this is why I was going to use Blue Iris with the plugin only on Vera

What notification setup do you use for the Crapple that has image notifications? I use VERA alerts on Androids. COMMENT I don’t have any of this set up yet, don’t even know what Crapple is…!

BlueIris is great, need a good processor (computer) or you’ll max out cpu. COMMENT I’m actually a Mac house but I do have a lower end server available, don’t remeber the CPU spec but now I’m worried it’s not enough machine.

I removed the Blueiris Plugin (Remember your on a LITE which is lite on RAM) I used the Virtual Motion Sensor plugin with child devices for each camera to get the motion into VERA without the picture. COMMENT ah ha so it’s the images that slow down Vera, and they come via the plugin as well as including the camera’s directly into Vera, right…?

I switched out all my foscams for the Hikvision 3mp poe. I have some Bullets (best versatility) but I do have some domes with the same specs. Never tried turrets but wanted to.[/quote]

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Doesn’t matter if you have the plugin or the camera directly in VERA’s eyes. So yes the VERA still has to process the images.

“Crapple” is Crappy Apple products, overpriced, under spec’d, closed minded system.
You might want to find out first which push notification or what ever notification system your going to use supports attachments of pictures. On apples in the past I used Vera Alerts plugin in VERA and Prowl on the iphone. I know Vera Alerts can push the URL images, but not sure if Prowl can receive. Vera alerts works with alot of other notfication systems tho even email. Email/text was never my favorite way of receiving notifications but it might be what your looking for.

Email with pics threw vera’s built in alerts might also be possible, but I’m unsure.

Maybe someone else can point you in the right direction on that.

As far as server goes. I have pushed people to BlueIris before but they always try and use some old computer or a 300 dell tower that just has an under powered processor. Blue iris doesn’t use much ram or a crazy video card, but it will run low end cpu’s at 100% load. 3MP cameras are also HD and up there in load. There is some blue iris tricks like direct to disc to get the cpu load down but then you also need a fast/good Hard drive to take the processing power off the CPU and record direct to the HD.

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A few observations from my experiences.

  1. I have two Vera3 units talking to each other over HTTP; one handles all the ZWave stuff the other handles the DSC Alarm and the BI PlugIn. I do not use any Vera Scenes, everything is controlled through PLEG.

  2. For system management I use ImperiHome on three wall mounted tablets around the house.

  3. I use Rex Beckett’s superb Virtual Motion Sensor to get Blue Iris’ camera motion detection information into the Vera than handles the ZWave. The Virtual Motion Sensor are set directly Blue Iris using HTTP.

  4. A month or so ago I removed the BI Plugin and reverted to using direct HTTP access to the BI camera stream for my ImperiHome setups. I was unhappy with two aspects of this; the image performance was very poor, stuttering and partial images, white screens, etc. And this was on the LAN! The other problem was remote access from ImperiHome, this required yet another IP redirect for the mobile device to access BI directly.

So I put the BI PlugIn back on the Vera3 with the DSC. This allowed integrated and much cleaner camera images on ImperiHome and avoided the problem of yet another redirect for BI, everything flows through the Vera connection I do use the BI Remote program as well, but I like having the camera images available in ImperiHome when I travel, if anything pops up I can revert the the BI Remote as needed. Strangely this Vera runs at 122% memory but rarely if ever has an unplanned restart for some reason. Overall I’m much happier with this arrangement despite the load.

  1. I have a total of 12 interior and exterior cameras running full time on BI on a ZBox running a 1.8Ghz Intel Atom processor, 3GB memory. All cameras are 1MP 720P units most of them run at 5FPS, three of them running 15FPS. I find this resolution and frame rate more than satisfactory for security. Three of the cameras are WiFi the rest PoE. The BI shows 45-48%CPU but if I ever tried recording everything I’m sure I’d eat it up. I have plans to upgrade the BI system to a i7 ZBox.

  2. The BI is set up with five profiles managed by Vera and switched based on the state of the DSC Alarm (Normal Day, Normal Night, Armed Away {Interior Cameras active}, Armed Home {Interior Cameras inactive}, and Violated {All Cameras active}) Recording occurs based on motion so even Violated only a few cameras will be trying to record at the same time.

Just another point of view.

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Thanks guys, this is all very helpful as I embark on new ground, at least for me. I’m sure I will have more questions as I go.