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We've delivered and installed two more BlueCherry DVR systems for camera recording and surveillance. It's a reliable, good looking and richly featured system, with good support. We were motivated to find a replacement because of the issues we found with ZoneMinder. These are - Consistent heavy CPU and disk utilisation, becauseof no hardware compression in the capture card, leading to high power use and heat generation, and the need for expensive high quality components, such as power supplies, fans and disks. This also makes the web interface slow to respond, as the machine is very busy.
- Poor presentation on the montage screen
- No unitary recording interface where you can see the camera images, and operate the controls
- Unreliable remote view in the web interface, it would consistently lock up after a short period of viewing
- Difficulty in searching for historic events and retrieving them to local video files.
So while ZoneMinder is a good basic solution, it lacks the polish and functionality to make it a great solution, or suitable for important installations. When people have stock, staff and resources at risk, they need a dependable way to monitor and retrieve event footage. Typically they need video retrieval at a very emotional time, in the aftermath of theft or violence. Having a system that is difficult to use or not gauranteed to get a result is very stressful, and this anger can quickly be passed to the system supplier. BlueCherry
BlueCherry is not open source, but it runs on an open source platform (Xubuntu), and is quick and easy to deploy. The cost of the software is incorporated into the cost of the hardware compression capture card, so the overall cost of the system is not expensive. For the quality of software delivered, it is very good value for money.
We've found BlueCherry doesn't strain the hardware, because of the work done by the compression card. Search and retrival is good, and users find they can operate it very successfully. Knowing the exact time of the event is helpful for fast retrieval. We have seen several crime in progress videos that have been captured and forwarded to police, or stills taken and posted on the customer notice board. The capture card has a composite TV out plug, which we've found useful for connecting an old television to show the camera either in the shop or in the lunchroom. Support on the forums has been excellent, with prompt replies to issues from core developers or management. BlueCherry provide their own apt deb repository, so upgrades are easy to apply, and resolve their own kernal and package version dependencies. The hardware cards are very good quality, from top Taiwanese video manufacturer Provideo, customised and exclusive for BlueCherry, showing considerable effort in good development by BlueCherry owner Curtis Hall and his team. Driver support with solo6010 is solid, and fully automatic. Uptime is superb, with no unexpected outages or restarts needed. We had one problem where the machine wanted to restart, but that was kernel security update, and after the restart service resumed. Security is very good, and easily supports staff having real time view only access for some cameras, while the owner can access all cameras, search and configuration. BlueCherry has support for moving PTZ cameras, but we haven't yet purchased or trialed one of these expensive beasts. The system comes configured for American standard NTSC cameras, but is easily changed to PAL for NZ. It is very camera friendly, displaying several different cameras with varying capabilities and resolution very clearly. We are very happy with BlueCherry DRV. It provides a reliable, effective, feature rich recording system, suitable for shops, homes, commercial premises, schools and community facilities. We look forward to installing more systems. |
