Hoping this doesn't turn into a Ford vs Chevy discussion....
I'm trying to decide whether to stick with Security Spy or switch to Blue Iris. SS has served me well, but with the SS5 release I need to decide whether to pay the upgrade fee or pay for a BI license instead. And if I go BI, I'll need another Parallels or Fusion license too. It's about $100 for the SS5 upgrade for my 8 camera license. $70 for BI plus VM. But if I want to add any more cameras, It's a couple hundred more for an SS 16 camera license. The BI license is good for more cameras than I could ever use.
I currently run SS on an upgraded 2010 Mac Pro (12 core, 40 GB RAM). It runs between 300-400% CPU for my eight cameras. I installed BI in a Fusion VM on the same system, and configured it with the same eight cameras. CPU usage of the VM is slightly more than SS.
What I have not tried to do yet is configure BI to write the video files directly to one of the Mac Pro's drives. I don't want them stored in a virtual drive in the VM. And I haven't played with the web interface to BI yet. Nor have I tried using the BlueIris plugin yet.
So, general questions -
At least one BI user called SS "expensive garbage" in a thread in this forum. I agree it's expensive compared to BI. But I have not had any usability issues with SS. So I'm wondering what the basis was for that characterization?
How hard is it to get BI in a VM to auto-start properly and to use the physical drives for storage? How hard is it to get the web server working properly in the VM?
How does the functionality of the BI plugin compare to the SS plugin?
Major functionality differences between SS and BI? SS5 has H.265 and the new AI driven motion detection. I don't see anything like those in BI, but maybe I just missed them.
Thanks!