Review on 📷 Amcrest Blue Iris Professional Version 5 - Complete IP Camera Solution with Motion Detection, H.265 Compression, E-Mail and SMS Alerts! by Billy Mariner

I have been using Amcrest cameras for several years and have always used Amcrest Surveillance Pro (free from Amcrest) to monitor my cameras and view recordings. I have each camera record to its own SD card. The downside to this is that viewing recordings is more tedious since you're reading directly from the camera's SD cards, which limits your bandwidth. Thus, playback in 2X or 4X was practically impossible. As I added more cameras, I realized I needed a more efficient way to manage them. Login to Blue Iris 5. BI5 works 24/7 on my PC. I can still do other work while BI5 is running, so a dedicated computer is not required. BI5 records to the PC's hard drive, so playback is now MUCH faster. Playback 8 times from 6 cameras at the same time with no problems. The time savings alone made this purchase worthwhile. Also, the BI5 saves me time as it has a much more efficient motion detection activation, which means fewer false alarms to check. BI5 also offers integration with Sentry Smart Alerts, which uses artificial intelligence to check if a person is in the frame when motion is detected. In this case, you can send an email notification letting you know that the person has been recognized. While not perfect yet, having BI5 integrated with such a service makes my security system that much smarter. Sentry is a subscription service so I'm waiting for a Sentry subscription until it gets better. BI5 also supports sound trigger if your camera has sound. BI5 supports a wide range of cameras and has many features that are more applicable to larger security systems, such as the learning curve for tuning is a bit steep. After that, daily use is very easy. I still have camera recordings on my own SD cards as a backup in case something happens to my PC, but live monitoring and reviewing of recordings is now done in BI5.