I’ve used Blue Iris for several months now to monitor a few security cameras we have installed around our house. It’s a brilliant piece of software that works as well as many software packages that cost four to ten times as much (trust me, I’ve experimented and tested packages that were $500 US).

The key features for me that I needed:

• Runs as a Windows Service — even if no one is logged onto the computer, the application is still monitoring
• Runs on Windows 2003 Server (or Windows Home Server).
• Can send e-mail alerts when motion is controlled with a configurable options (like the maximum frequency of e-mails sent within a period).
• Support of my IP based cameras.
• Reasonable CPU usage (about 30-40% constant on my home server to monitor 4 cameras).
• Continually updated — not a dead product
• Remote access via a web page (the product does this well, but it’s not an attractive web page — just functional).
• Priced competitively — this product is priced almost too low — at $49.95 for the unlimited package.
• Stable — I haven’t had a single problem with the stability of the product in months.

It has tons of options for configuration:

Tons of settings for each individual camera:

Here’s the built in web application (it’s ActiveX or Java based):

It even works with my Airlink 250W wireless IP camera (with a few tricks):

Even though the main application user interface is not very "professional" — it’s a killer program and if you need something like this, I’d strongly recommend you consider it.

Windows only.