Home Security: Getting the D-Link DCS8000-LH to work with Blue Iris

So… this is a bit different from the usual “tech sketches”, but I wanted to document the information that I have so it can help others.

For my home security setup, I have a number of IP cameras connected to Blue Iris software. I was first attracted to the D-Link DCS8000LH because of its cute little form factor — I thought it would look less imposing and integrate better into a normal household setup.

Unfortunately, the DCS8000LH is not an officially supported IP cam for Blue Iris. However, I managed to get it to work through a combination of information I found in other forums and with a little bit of help directly from Blue Iris.

The final answer is to select “D-Link DCS-2121/2130/2230/5222/6915 MJPEG” as your make/model, and also configure the camera to output an MJPEG stream (instead of H.264 or whatever its default setting is).

To configure the camera, first follow the set-up instructions from D-Link. The instructions are in the box, but the basic steps are:

1. Turn on Bluetooth on your phone
2. Download the D-Link app (Don’t worry, you can perform the entire configuration process offline. You don’t have to create a D-Link account or link these cameras to the cloud in any way.)
3. Open the app, click “add device”, and scan the bar code on the bottom of the camera
4. Wait a long time for it to link up
5. Program in the Wi-Fi information
6. Set a password for the camera

After that was done, I followed the instructions from this post at ZoneMinder to configure the camera to output MJPEG. In case that link goes dead in the future, the steps were:

1. From your web browser, first go here:

http://<IP ADDRESS>/config/video.cgi?profileid=1&codec=MJPEG

The user is admin and the password is the one your set in step #6 from above.

2. Wait until your browser downloads a file called video.cgi. This indicates that the configuration was accepted. You can open this file using a text editor to verify that the codec has been set to MJPEG.

3. In Blue Iris, set the IP address using http://, give it the admin/password for your camera. Everything is default (port, etc.), except for the video path (which is /video/mjpg.cgi) and video param (which is profileid=1).

4. That’s it! It should be working. MJPEG has no audio, so no need to worry about the audio settings.

I hope this information helps. I really love Blue Iris and want to try to contribute to its information ecosystem as much as I can.

Ultimately, though, I returned the D-Link DCS8000LH cameras. The frame rate was lower than the D-LINK DCS2132L (plus, the DCS2132L is cheaper!). In addition, the inability to control the IR LEDs and the lack of sound just made the whole thing unjustifiable, despite how pretty the overall packaging looked.

D-Link DCS2132L