Blue Iris Review

I see you.

Submitted by Japan on Mon, 2006-02-20 12:55.
Author's Product Rating:
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The lowest price: 35.1$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
Very low price for all the features Blue Iris offers
Cons:
Fairly sophisticated, one needs to be tech savvy to figure it out.
Review:

Blue Iris has two major advantages. The first one is a low price. The second one is an incredible degree of sophistication of software.

Basically, what Blue Iris does is that it allows you to hookup a camcorder or a web camera to your PC and create own surveillance system. In fact, you can hook up 16 cameras all at ones (I am not sure why the description says it’s 12, must be a bit outdated).

Clearly, however, the installation process (I’m talking wires and cams here) is pretty sophisticated. If you are a newbie, you might be able to hook up one camera and set the program up to do all you want it to do, but I doubt that any inexperienced person would be able to build a multiple camera system on his own. Not likely.

Ok, now let’s talk features.

One, motion detection. This is incredibly important. If you are going to record video, doing it continuously will eat up your hard-drive space in no time. So motion detection feature is the best way to go, if you are monitoring for break and entry. But if you are monitoring your kids or pets, this won’t help, you’ll have to invest into a new hard-drive or set the PC to record images (JPEGs) instead of video.

Audio support is also an important feature. Clearly, you’ll need cameras that have microphones, but these are usually more expensive, especially if you want good quality audio.

Zoom and pan. That’s pretty cool too. You can zoom an pan when you use clip viewer. You won’t be able to do it real-time.

Multiple alerts are certainly helpful as well - loudspeaker, email, instant message, voice phone call, or external program/script – that’s pretty standard.

Live broadcasting over the Internet. Blue Iris does this as well, though if your only purpose is to webcast live, I suggest you look for software that does only that.

Conclusion:

Good inexpensive home surveillance system software