Watch your live security camera feed online.
Watch your live security camera feed online.
Hello everyone, I have a brief inquiry. Our site currently hosts about 128 cameras, and the security PC at the station isn’t powerful enough for smooth monitoring. Watching everything at once causes video to stutter or display old clips, like seeing yourself walking to the station. I’m looking for a tool or resource that lets me input PC specifications and shows the maximum streaming capacity. We have an i7-12700 with 16GB RAM and no GPU. I’m thinking about boosting RAM further since it’s often near full, and considering adding a GPU—maybe an RTX 5050—but not sure if it’s sufficient. Alternatively, a better GPU like an RTX 2080 could help. Having a site or utility to test different setups would be really helpful.
That i am not sure I do know if using software decoding it dependent on CPU cores and RAM or there is an option for hardware decoding which will push it on to the GPU for decoding but as to what is really needed i am not sure. Right now we are using hardware decoding system utiliaztion is as follows: intel integrated GPU is at 75-90% RAM is at 80% CPU is at 35-45% If using software decoding CPU jumps to 90% while GPU will jump to 1-5% In both cases the results is the same.
This section covers the resolution and bitrate of camera feeds. For a standalone NVR/server with multiple cameras, you can configure different encoding and resolution streams. Use higher resolution and frame rate for actual recordings, and lower resolution for live viewing. With cameras at 2K or above, full high-resolution live streams aren't necessary.
We are currently employing three NVRs of 2x32 channels and one 64-channel setup. The software we're using is the manufacturer's recommended version for the NVR ivms-4200. To accommodate additional cameras, we plan to install a fourth NVR. When using live view in mini mode—showing all cameras simultaneously—it defaults to a substream stream of 640x360 at 128kbps. For streaming a single camera, it switches to the mainstream format, which ranges from 1080p or 2K depending on the camera. For fun, I attempted to run everything in mainstream mode, but performance dropped significantly and all systems froze instantly.
Likely requires a dedicated GPU and extra RAM would help. I've noticed this with many clients who run NVR software on their main work PCs for live viewing. We've either needed a separate PC/NUC for camera tasks or added a discrete GPU. You probably don't need anything extreme, but around 12-14 cameras seems to be the upper limit for iGPU decoding based on what I've seen. A 2070/80 would be better than a lower-gen card. What codec is the NVR using for the streams? H.264, 265, or another format?
You might consider using h265 for the stream as well at this stage. It offers better efficiency than 264, potentially increasing overhead. Check your PC's resource monitor to observe GPU usage—128 camera streams can be demanding on decoding.