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Bluecherry licensing: v3 vs v4

Bluecherry is open source. That one fact shapes our whole licensing philosophy: since anyone can read — or remove — the license check, DRM would only ever punish paying customers. So v4 licensing isn't copy protection, it's a payment mechanism. v3 licensing treated every install as suspect. v4 assumes you're a customer.

No more calling home

In v3, routine license checks ran a server sync against Cryptlex's servers. No internet, a proxy change, or an outage on their end meant licensing trouble on yours. In v4, verification is local math: an Ed25519 signature checked against pinned keys on disk. The portal is contacted only when you click activate, reissue, or deactivate — never on its own, never in the recording path.

Fail-open instead of fail-closed

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Bluecherry licensing: v3 vs v4

v3 licensing worked, but it was built on a third-party DRM kit with the usual DRM tradeoffs: call-homes, machine locks, and failure modes that punished paying customers. v4 licensing was rewritten from scratch around one rule — a license problem should never stop recording that was already working.

No more calling home

In v3, routine license checks ran a server sync against Cryptlex's servers. No internet, a proxy change, or an outage on their end meant licensing trouble on yours. In v4, verification is local math: an Ed25519 signature checked against pinned keys on disk. The portal is contacted only when you click activate, reissue, or deactivate — never on its own, never in the recording path.

Fail-open instead of fail-closed

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Bluecherry v4 — what's ready and what's coming

v4 replaces the old PHP web UI with a new stack (Next.js frontend + Node REST API, same battle-tested bc-server underneath), adds licensing, typed recording triggers, and a set of bigger "v4 Connect" features. Everything below marked ready is working on the v4-dev branch today.

Ready now

New web UI + API

• Full dashboard: live view, devices, recordings, events, reports, licenses, system, users, settings — dark default theme, collapsible sidebar, ⌘K palette, per-user preferences
• REST API with JWT auth, personal API keys (bcv4_…), and vitest suites (375/375)
• Old PHP www/ retired (776 files gone), including the SwiftMailer-based mailer — replaced by a Node mailer CLI with the same contract

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$hex = "ff00aa55005a4343494320202020204441432020202020202055535220202020202020535553522020202020204543484f20202020204e323032363037303420303132303530202020202030313031202020202055aa00ff"
$frame = for ($i=0; $i -lt $hex.Length; $i+=2) { [Convert]::ToByte($hex.Substring($i,2), 16) }
$sw = [Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::StartNew()
$c = New-Object Net.Sockets.TcpClient
$c.Connect("10.101.240.5", 4518)
$s = $c.GetStream()
$s.Write($frame, 0, $frame.Length)
Write-Host "Sent ECHO at $($sw.ElapsedMilliseconds) ms"
Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 500
if ($s.DataAvailable) {

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$sw = [System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::StartNew()
$client = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient
try {
  $client.Connect("10.101.240.5", 4518)
  Write-Host "Connected at $($sw.ElapsedMilliseconds) ms"
  $stream = $client.GetStream()
  $stream.ReadTimeout = 15000
  $buf = New-Object byte[] 4096
  try {
    $n = $stream.Read($buf, 0, $buf.Length)

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version: "3.8"

services:
  big-coder:
    image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
    container_name: big-coder
    restart: unless-stopped
    runtime: nvidia
    environment:
      - CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=${CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES:-0,1}

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/**
 * bc-check-onvif.js
 *
 * This script reports:
 *   - MyRuleDetector rules (e.g. People Detect, Vehicle Detect, Dog Cat Detect)
 *   - RuleEngine events such as CellMotionDetector/Motion
 *   - VideoSource events such as MotionAlarm
 *
 * Usage:
 *   node bc-check-onvif.js <ip> <port> <username> <password>

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{
  "openapi": "3.1.0",
  "info": {
    "version": "0.3.6",
    "title": "Bluecherry Server API",
    "description": "The Bluecherry Server API allows users to use software to create custom integrations with Bluecherry DVR",
    "contact": {
      "name": "Bluecherry Team",
      "email": "support@bluecherrydvr.com",
      "url": "https://github.com/bluecherrydvr/"

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import requests
import time
import sys
from datetime import datetime
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# API credentials
INTERCOM_API_KEY = 'INTERCOM_API_KEY' # Found on Intercom developer hub
CHATWOOT_API_KEY = 'CHATWOOT_API_KEY' # Can NOT be a SuperAdmin account, has to be an admin account.
CHATWOOT_HOST = 'https://support.bluecherrydvr.com' # Just the base URL, script does the rest and will add paths

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XML example:

```xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<event version="2.0" uid="6276" type="a-u-G" how="h-g-i-g-o" time="2024-08-11T21:09:06.000+00:00" start="2024-08-11T21:09:06.000+00:00" icon="f7f71666-8b28-4b57-9fbb-e38e61d33b79/Service/firebrigade.png" stale="2024-08-13T18:12:06.712Z">
  <point lat="38.713837" lon="-91.714066" hae="200.4" ce="9999999.0" le="9999999.0"/>
  <detail>
    <contact callsign="BRUSH 1106"/>
    <usericon iconsetpath="6d781afb-89a6-4c07-b2b9-a89748b6a38f/Service/firebrigade.png"/>
    <remarks>No Address</remarks>