Blue Iris Surveillance Review

Our company was looking to install a couple cameras for basic asset tracking. Nothing Big Brother, just your standard security measures. After a bit of research I settled on the D-Link DCS-1110 camera. It has POE, which reduces the wiring, and advertised motion detection and recording to a SMB share.

Of course, as with most D-Link things, the hardware works great. The software...crap.

So I was forced to find an alternative. It soon became clear that I needed to use the good hardware in conjunction with some good software that could provide the motion detection and recording for me. A little bit of Googling brought me to Blue Iris.

I was quite skeptical at first, primarily because the cost of the product is so reasonable. Most of the other video products out there either accompany cameras, or are rediculously expensive, but the full Blue Iris product can be had for $50.

I installed the demo, went in clean and quickly. No bloat here. Next was to install the DCS-1110. Working with the interface was great. There are *alot* of options, but they are well laid out over several tabs. I had some problems connection to the DCS-1110 properly, so I checked the help file. It has fairly detailed information as well as some specific information on the D-Link series of cameras. Tried everything I could, but no luck. Convinced I was missing something, I contacted the developer by email.

In the end, it was me - not the product - that had been mis-configuring things. However, the real kicker was the support response time: 30 minutes. Working as an IT professional I can safely say that a 30 minute turn around time on a SUPPORT email is a very very rare thing. I was immediately confident in the product, thanks to Ken at Blue Iris. I get the feeling they are a one or two man shop, which gives me the warm fuzzies when buying from them.

We've since added a second camera, tinkered with the settings, and really had continued success with the product. This stuff Just Works. And that's so rare these days.

http://blueirissoftware.com/