Hi, I have Blue Iris running on a Windows 10 machine. From time to time, for various reasons, it dies, and I need to manually reboot the machine to get it to come back up again. I would like to have a tile on my Hubitat dashboard that shows Red or Green depending on if Blue Iris is Down or Up. I saw this post: Best way to integrate Blue Iris and Hubitat?, where the poster is using WebCore to do some fancy integration. I have no need for such a deep integration, just a status monitoring is sufficient. What is the easiest way to accomplish this?
Are they ip cameras that you can ping?
If search for Hubitat Ping. You could use Tile Builder to turn that ping status into dashboard tile that indicates up or down state.
Probably the easiest way is to have a cam snapshot tile on the dashboard and have it refresh every couple seconds. No apps or integration needed. No snapshot = no blue iris.
I think the issue is a snapshot at 9:00 pm looks a lot like a snapshot at 2:00 am so it’s not the easiest thing to catch.
But if the snapshot refreshes frequently, then when blue Iris is down the tile should show an error.
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Assuming you're running BI as service you could set the PC to automatically restart after an electrical power supply interruption and then auto log into Windows. Then you could plug the PC into a smart plug and use Hubitat to monitor the ping results of the IP address using Rule Machine. If the ping fails, RM power cycles the smart plug which reboots the PC and restarts Windows and BI.
Here's a RM example of how I'm doing this:
Nice ideas, all! Thanks so much for the responses.
@garyjmilne, yes there are ip cams. Maybe this is the easiest.
@Navat604, how do I show cam snapshot tile in Hubitat?
@Vettester This is a good idea. First, I want to get the status monitoring working, then I can move to the actuation phase!
Edit:
Big OOPS! None of these ideas will actually work, I am afraid. I want to detect the presence of Blue Iris, NOT the cameras. The cameras are always up. It's the Blue Iris software (or the PC that it runs on) that goes down. So, I am back to square one. Any ideas on directly monitoring Blue Iris?
The suggestion I made will monitor the PC. If you don’t want to automate the restart process you could replace the smart plug with a virtual switch that you could put on your dashboard. You could also add some notification logic to the rule and have it send you a push notification.
If you just want to monitor the BI application there are multiple ways of doing this, but not all of them integrate with Hubitat. There’s an old application called Event Ghost that you can install on your BI PC. It can monitor your BI application and it also has a driver for Hubitat. You can find more information on this option by searching this forum.
Another way of monitoring your BI app would be to use BI Tools.
This doesn’t integrate with Hubitat, but you can set it up to send you a Pushover message if there’s an issue with BI.
@krishkal Is it the interface that dies, or the network connection? Meaning is the windows machine still running and you can access it but not access anything on the network or is blue iris itself down?
@Vettester i will check out those suggestions.
@rlithgow1 mostly it’s Blue Iris, but sometimes the PC. It’s not often enough that I have bothered to track down various things that may be happening. I just restart the PC once every few weeks and all is good. Just thought it would be nifty to see on my Hubitat dashboard if it is up or down.
Mostly, I was going from the post I cited in my OP above, where @markles seems to be having two way communications between Hubitat and Blue Iris. I was thinking some simplified version of that would be handy to know BI was up or down on the network.
Well you can force restart a crashed app, or if the whole pc is locked, power cycle it via hub rule or if it's just the network card and not the os, have it reboot when that crashes. Just saying you could automate all 3 and get notified of when it's happening
I don't even bother with snapshot. Instead I use low framerate and low resolution video on an image tile. Blue Iris url
http://IP:port/mjpg/CamName/video.mjpg?fps=3&decode=-1
For image you can use something like this
/image/CamName?q=50&s=80
A single JPEG image from a specific camera or group, with optional quality (q) and scale (s) parameters. Quality is a percentage from 1-100, and scale may be any number >0
These tools look promising:
Watchdog can ping / launch a URL if Blue Iris closes.
Send to Maker API and flip a virtual switch or light a virtual bulb.
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You can trigger a virtual switch if BI goes down using this method, but you would have to come up with someway of switching it back. However, where there's a will there's a way. 
I interface Hubitat with BlueIris using [Deprecated] BI Control - Local Blue Iris control, for all my Hubitat/BI automations. It has continued to work flawlessly. Of course, my BI Windows machine is very stable. You could maybe expose a callable API on BI and then use a rule machine to hit that API and check for responses.
Thanks for taking the time to make some wonderful suggestions, all!
From a passing comment by @Vettester, I came to know of BI's ability to be run as a service. I was previously running it manually every time the PC rebooted. Now, I have it as a service, and that works out well. I also set a "daily reboot" in the task scheduler to reboot in the middle of the night. With these two changes, I am hoping my BI will be stable, and I don't need to monitor it. If that turns out to be a bad assumption, I will try some of the other suggestions. Thanks all!
I tried doing this. When I use the URL you provided, just on a browser, it takes me to a Blue Iris login page, where I have to put in my Blue Iris user name and password before it shows me the video. I tried the usual http://user:password@IP:port/.... format, but that does not work either. How is that handled? Thanks!
Edit: I figured out that the syntax is to add &user=uname&pw=password at the end of the URL. This works fine from a browser. However, when I try to add an "image" tile to a dashboard, and use this URL, I still get a "?" icon, no image. What am I doing wrong?
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You need to disable "secure only" on Options/Web server in your blue iris setting.
Thanks, that worked.
HOWEVER, it turns out that I had the wrong assumption regarding how all this worked. I had assumed that the Hubitat Hub would communicate via the LAN to access the image/video, and then convey it over the dashboard to wherever I am viewing from. Apparently, this is NOT the case. When you add the "image" tile, it's like a little browser iFrame (maybe not exactly that, but same idea) that goes and directly accesses the image, without the hub involvement. So, since my BI is not accessible outside my firewall (for security reasons), this actually does not work for me.
Does anyone know of a way to make this work as I had envisioned - i.e., the Hub accesses the BI over the LAN to get the images to send over to the dashboard? Would the (Deprecated) method suggested by @troywehrle work like that?
Thanks!
Your recent learning of how the dashboard image tile is correct. The browser display showing the dashboard is what calls to the URL for the BI image. Hence why you put the BI URL in that tiles config. The URL format for all systems running on the same LAN is:
http://<BI IP>:<BI port>/mjpg/<camera name>/video.mjpg?user=<BI login user>&pw=<BI login password>
If your dashboard is running outside your LAN, you would need a method to expose the camera image externally from your LAN. This can be very tricky and full of errors that can expose your network to bad culprits across the public net. I would advise against it for just the camera image.
For me personally, if I am accessing my dashboards remotely, I connect my phone to my local network VPN first, then my phone IS essentially on my local network, so those internal local network URL's work as-is.
The deprecated app I was referring to above, was in reference to getting access to certain features in BI from Hubitat. I do not believe that will help your use case for the image.
