[Leaplist] Linux configurable ip surveillance camera systems

[John Simpson]

On 2010-02-23, at 1326, Dan Trevino wrote:
> 
> What is your opinion on zoneminder?

it's a nice little solution, for *small* deployments. it's all open source, it stores the raw video files on whatever filesystem you tell it to use, it gives you a nice web interface to control the streams and review events, with multiple access levels (so you can set up "view-only" users if needed, or give certain users access to certain video streams but not others), it has motion detection and can dynamically adjust the capture frame rate when it detects motion, and it uses mysql to keep track of the recordings and events.

my last employer was using zoneminder to monitor 20 cameras (16 composite NTSC and 4 IP-cameras), and the machine was fairly well maxed out, even though it had dual quad-zeon processors, 8GB RAM, and two 3ware 9650-series hardware RAID cards (one doing hardware RAID-1 for the boot drive, and one doing hardware RAID-5 for the data storage drive, where the raw video files were stored.) i remember having to rebuild the entire machine from scratch in order to add the hardware RAID cards and install an updated version of zoneminder, and while it was better than the previous incarnation, it still wasn't what i would consider perfect.

i will say that the picture quality on the IP cameras was MUCH better than the others. the older NTSC cameras were connected to a 16-port video capture card, which was several years old and i suspect had its own heat issues. i remember occasionally one of the cameras would hiccup, and it take out one of the four-camera channels within the card, necessitating a power-cycle to reset the card and bring those four cameras back online (otherwise they just showed the last image received from that camera, as a static image.)

i think if you're only monitoring a few cameras, zoneminder can be a good solution, but i don't know that i would trust it for more than about eight cameras.


----------------------------------------------------------------
| John M. Simpson    ---   KG4ZOW   ---    Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                         <jms1 at jms1.net> |
----------------------------------------------------------------
| http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173 |
----------------------------------------------------------------





-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.leap-cf.org/pipermail/leaplist/attachments/20100306/3673b2c1/PGP.bin