Specifications

The AVI format has the advantage of being easily shared from PC to PC, while Blue Iris DVR

files may only be read by Blue Iris (however, it is possible to export AVI clips of a .bvr file).

The Blue Iris DVR format allows videos to be read and written simultaneously, as well as for

videos to exceed 1GB, both of which are limitations of the AVI file format. The Blue Iris DVR

format is also a highly-efficient flat-file format as opposed to the RIFF structure found in AVI

files. You should consider using this format when creating large video files or when you need

to access the video while it is still open for writing. Before the content of a Blue Iris DVR file

may be played on a PC without Blue Iris, you must Edit the clip as described in the

Working

with Clips (See 10.) topic in order to create an interchangeable format file (AVI, MP4, or WMV).

The Windows Media and MPEG-4 formats, although the least efficient to record, are also the

most portable and provides the most precise control over compression settings for advanced

users.

When you choose AVI or Blue Iris DVR, you may select the video encoder (codec). Currently,

you may choose from either H.264 (the default, a highly efficient MPEG4 variant), or MJPG (no

temporal compression).

The H.264 codec is now the default compression. It is the most efficient in terms of the

amount of hard disk space consumed. You may specify a quality% from 0 to 100, 100 being

the clearest possible picture, but consuming enormous amounts of disk space. You will likely

find no need to exceed the default of 70%. The key frame interval allows you to set the

number of frames that are compressed before a "full" frame is compressed. The higher this

value, the less disk space will be consumed, but the more potentially sluggish it will be to

randomly access a clip in the clip viewer. If you specify a value of 1, each frame will be a key

frame.

The XVID MPEG4 codec may be preferred on slower systems, or on systems where you will be

recording from many cameras at once, and you find that your CPU utilization is too high with

the H.264 codec. Install XVID from xvid.org and XVID will then appear on the list of video

encoders.

The MJPG codec used by Blue Iris was installed automatically for you as well. The MJPG codec

is highly efficient in terms of CPU usage, but not very efficient in terms of hard disk space

consumed (because each frame is a key frame). One limitation of this codec over the others is

that only "standard" frame dimensions can be compressed--the video height must be a

multiple of 16, and large dimensions, such as a screen capture of 1280x800 may in fact crash

the MJPG codec.

When you select the MJPG codec, you may then specify a frame size (from 1-200 KB per frame

of video) and a quality setting (from 1 to 100). You can use the frame size value, multiplied by