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Input Devices Open Source

Bluecherry Open Sources Its Entire Linux Surveillance Server (bluecherrydvr.com) 30

"Big changes are here," writes the official blog for Bluecherry: In 2010 we released our multi-port MPEG4 video capture card with an open source driver (solo6x10) and in 2011 updated the driver to support our multi-port H.264 capture cards. Later, this open source driver was later added into the mainline Linux kernel. In 2013 we released our multi-platform surveillance application client with an open source (GPL) license.

We are proud to announce that Effective April 18, 2019 we have released the entire Bluecherry software application open source with a GPL license.

An anonymous reader writes: This includes the Linux based server application and the Windows / Linux / OS X client.

Bluecherry's GitHub repo is now open for public viewing.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Bluecherry Open Sources Its Entire Linux Surveillance Server

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  • (Hint: You can tell by the speed and count of astro-turfers preemptively shitting on it for no clear reason.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Yeah, as far as CCTV gear goes they're by far the best. They make sweet PCI cards with stuff like hardware NTSC and PAL encoders to stream live footage to disk for 16 (I think up to 128 channels max per server with multiple cards) and some decent (not great, but decent) software to manage the feeds. The greatest thing about them imo is that they aren't black boxes, you can build out a CCTV server on the linux or bsd of your choice then have some comfort in knowing it's not an off the shelf DVR that's comp
  • by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday April 21, 2019 @05:06PM (#58468528) Homepage

    yes! a company that has worked out that they sell *product*, not information *about* product. in designing any piece of hardware, one of the most absolutely sure-fire guaranteed ways to ensure that a particular component is eliminated within minutes to days is: require NDAs or just don't have a publicly-accessible set of source code, drivers and worked examples.

    the majority of companies selling hardware for some reason simply do not understand this. they sell hardware... yet do not provide the information on how to *use* the hardware. how can anyone design a product where information required to evaluate and use the component is not readily available! so, well done bluecherry. 9 years is a long time, however you got there in the end. hope your sales increase as a result.

  • I'm guessing most don't know what Bluecherry is, and the summary is of little help. It is a video camera / live and video capture platform.
  • Awesome (Score:5, Informative)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @06:52PM (#58468816) Journal

    As someone who looked at Bluecherry for developing an in-home surveillance DVR, this is great.

    If you don't know what it is, in a nutshell, "Bluecherry is a Linux-based video surveillance application with a cross platform client."

    I've been trying to get Zoneminder to work, but Bluecherry has some real advantages. There's a good comparison chart here:

    http://www.bluecherrydvr.com/z... [bluecherrydvr.com]

    • Why do they call it Bluecherry? If they used something descriptive people might know what it is.

      • Why do they call it Bluecherry? If they used something descriptive people might know what it is.

        Maybe all the usefully descriptive names had already been copyrighted by other suppliers?

    • by inflex ( 123318 )

      At least now that it's open source someone can finally add the features that a lot of people have been asking for in their forums for the last 5 years.

      I'm suspecting that they (BlueCherry) simply didn't have the inclination to fix bugs or add features in spite of the requests, so it's easier for them to turf it to OpenSource and hope for the best.

      Definitely was/is a lot saner to use than ZM (maybe if ZM merged in features more often, instead it seems we've now got a choice of a dozen forks of which none ha

      • ZM has nearly driven me mad due to all the options and settings- there are literally over a million configuration permutations, and if you get any one of them wrong it won't show anything. I've had very limited success getting it to connect to 4 or 5 working cameras, even using RTSP which is supposed to be very simple. It's not.

    • Perhaps Bluecherry don't want anyone to look through this chart, since it is shown with another of those stupid unreadable grey on white fonts. So I'm ignoring it. What are the advantages that Bluecherry has again?
      • Perhaps Bluecherry don't want anyone to look through this chart, since it is shown with another of those stupid unreadable grey on white fonts.

        I know, that bullshit drives me bonkers.

        What, exactly, is wrong with black text on a white background? Not trendy enough? Too easy to read? I have no idea.

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      They list 3 separate clients as advantages, although i'd say requiring a proprietary client is actually a disadvantage.. There's no reason you can't view camera feeds in a standard browser these days, which would then be viewable from any device including a smart tv etc.

  • Cool! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pi_rules ( 123171 ) on Monday April 22, 2019 @09:07AM (#58470788)

    I've been using BlueCherry for nearly 8 years now. It's not perfect but I still like it.

    The most annoying bug(s) for me are related to the client. Video sometimes won't fast-forward, or if it does it goes really slow. It works on some computers and not others. I get why -- there's a lot of libraries it depends on and they never ironed out how to make it work right under every install.

    But I can't complain -- they open sourced the client years ago and I haven't tried fixing it. I'm a decent enough developer; I _should_ be able to; but the build environment always kept tripping me up.

    The server's never really given me much of an issue though. They've had some releases that spiked CPU but always fixed those quickly.

    I run somewhere around 42 cameras with it FWIW.

  • ...is what they make and sell. They're good ones, and that they're open-sourcing the drivers make them *far* more marketable.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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