STARTUP
Many startup options control the way in which Blue Iris works with the operating system.

By default the software will re-open its main window with the same position and size.

However you may also select to have it always open Quietly (minimized and no splash
screen) or to have it immediately Go full screen video. Some prefer to retain the Windows
taskbar on the screen as well.
Running as a service or without Administrator privileges is quite an important topic, so it
is covered in the next chapter on Administration.
You can force the software window to be Always on top of other windows on the screen.
You may have the operating system place a Blue Iris icon in the “system tray” notification
area rather than the taskbar.

You may also specify a password which must be used to reopen the window. The icon has a
right-click popup menu however only if there is no password set.
Three additional options exist to help prioritize the Blue Iris window on your desktop. You
may prevent the Windows screensaver; you may prevent the monitor from sleeping due
to a power saving setting; you may prevent power-saving features from sleeping the PC
entirely.
Unless you are running as a service, by default you will be prompted for confirmation when
attempting to close the software.
If you choose to begin with a red shield, you must manually arm the software by clicking
the shield icon. Before turning green, by default the shield goes through a yellow state if the
delay green shield option is set.

DIGITAL I/O AND IOT
Digital Input/Output and the “Internet of Things” options here provide additional ways in
which Blue Iris is able to interact with with systems or hardware devices.

Serial port
This option provides simple serial port connectivity to an Arduino box, a GCE electronics
controller, or similar. In addition to the COM port, assumed to be configured for 9600
baud, No parity, 1 stop bit, you must specify the protocol to use.
A “single byte” protocol was implemented in very early versions of the software for the
Arduino.
For setting the output signal, the software sends a single ASCII number character equal to the
output number. That is ‘0’, ‘1’, ‘2’ etc. No corresponding character is sent when the output
signal is reset.
For reading input signals, the software looks at each byte received from the serial port as a
set of 8 input bits—the input bits are binary encoded.
The GCE electronics protocol implemented offers more flexibility, and may still be used
with an Arduino with the appropriate sketch.
For setting the output signal, the software sends 3 bytes, always the letter ’S’ followed by the
ASCII output number ‘0’, ‘1’, ‘2’ etc., and then either a ‘1’ or ‘0’ character depending on
whether the signal is being set or reset.
As with the Arduino protocol selection, bytes received from the serial port are interpreted as
sets of 8 bits each for 8 input signals.
Sealevel Systems
You can avoid having to work with Arduino or other device programming and scripting by
using a piece of hardware more dedicated to digital I/O. We have had great success with the
ease of operation and integration of Sealevel Systems devices.
https://www.sealevel.com
The software supports both USB and Ethernet variants of these devices. Devices are
available with a range of inputs and outputs. Known compatible models are the 8206, 8209,
8222, 8223, 8232, 8221, 8113 and 8112 for USB, or 120E or 130E for Ethernet. They offer
many other models compatible with these as well—as long as the SM_ReadDigitalOutputs and
SM_WriteDigitalOutputs calls are supported through their driver, the device will be
compatible.
The option to Re-open the device on a timed basis may be required if the connection if the
connection is unreliable.

Control
You may select whether input circuits are normally “closed” or “open” as the normal “reset”
state in the software. In other words, generally when the LED is lit on the SeaLevel device,
this is a “set” condition, but you may reverse this sense.
You may define a complete Action set to be executed as any input signal is set or reset. Please
see the Alerts and Actions chapter for details on configuration.
A camera may be triggered based on the state of these global input bits—see the Trigger
page in camera settings. Also, any action set may be configured to set these global output
bits.
MQTT
MQTT is a “machine to machine” protocol for “Internet of Things” connectivity. Please see
http://mqtt.org for details.

MQTT works by having a broker accept connections from clients. Clients subscribe to or
listen for traffic relevant to their function. Blue Iris is one such client. Eclipse Mosquito is
one such broker that can be installed on running on Windows, but the software can be
configured to connect to a broker anywhere on the Internet. Please see https://
mosquitto.org/download/ for details.
An MQTT message has a topic and a payload. A topic may have an additional sub-topic by
using a slash. The software sends these messages:

The software responds to these messages received:

Possible /admin commands are identical to those offered by the web server, documented in
the Administration chapter.
Options
Select to use Auth TLS only if this is required by your broker.
The Test button will setup a loopback, both publishing and requesting the same topic in
order to check 2-way connectivity to the broker.

AUDIO AND MICROPHONE
A microphone may be configured primarily for use with the camera Talk function. You must
specify the device, input line, and format. A mono format should be selected, and generally
8000 or 11025 Hz is a sufficient sampling rate for this application.

Adjust the gain so that when you speak naturally the audio power bar occupies the majority
of its control window without hitting the right-hand side. When the audio power reaches
this level, sample “clipping” will occur and there may be audible clicking or other quality
loss as a result.
Output
You should not have a need to change this setting unless your system has multiple sound
cards and you do not wish to use the primary sound card for audio playback by Blue Iris.
JOYSTICK
A joystick may be used for camera PTZ operation. If a compatible Windows DirectInput
joystick has been attached and its driver is functioning, you will see it on this page.

You must use the Control panel button to get to the joystick driver’s properties page.

From here you can test functionality of the X and Y movements, as well as Z which will be
used for Zoom level. The joystick buttons, if available, will be mapped to PTZ preset
positions. Switch to the Settings tab to find the Calibration button.

Once you have completed this calibration you can test the joystick function once again
through the control panel before trying it with an actual camera window.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
The software can memorize a number of keyboard shortcuts for your commonly used
functions or commands.

Use Add or Edit and you will be prompted

Select a function from the list and then use the Set to next command typed button to set
the keyboard combination by example.

MACROS
A macro is text that is substituted for a shorter “token” of some sort. The macro tokens %1 – %9 may be used in camera video overlays, as well as throughout the software for things
like email, push notification and SMS body and subject fields.

Although only 9 may be set here, the software actually supports up to 99 of these. You will
find a section in the Windows registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Perspective Software\Blue Iris\Macros
Other software, scripts or the HTTP/JSON interfaces may be used to write to this location
and Blue Iris will immediately adopt the new text. It’s also possible to link a macro to a text
file, perhaps generated in real-time by a weather app for example. The file may contain
multiple lines separated with new line (hex 0x0A) characters.
OTHER
The majority of what you will find on this page has been discussed in-context in other
sections. There are a few exceptions:

The temp path is used by the software for temporarily saving JPEG images for upload, as
well as temporary files for remote management. You may select a target maximum to retain
for each remote system under management, however the folder can grow quite large when
clips are viewed remotely. Please insure that this location is chosen appropriately and will
not result in a disc full condition on a disc used for the database ore recording.
Advanced
By default, scrolling down with the mouse wheel is used to zoom-in, and scrolling up is used
to zoom-out. You may be accustomed to an OS or interface which has an opposite sense,
and the option to reverse this is provided here.
Your options for video Scaling are Fast, Bilinear and Bicubic. Bilinear will provide better
quality than Fast and Bicubic will provide better quality than Bilinear. There is of course an
increasing CPU cost. This setting does not affect the way that video is recorded, only the
way in which it is drawn onto the display.
The CPU usage factor can be used to adjust the way in which Blue Iris displays the CPU
utilization in the status bar and as is reported for remote management. If Blue Iris shows
20%, but your task manager shows 40%, please set this value to 2.00.