[PLUG] ZoneMinder / Alternatives

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

Is anybody using ZoneMinder, or some other FOSS alternative?  I'd be
interested in non-FOSS feedback as well assuming it is entirely
self-hosted.

I've looked at some of the Ring-like devices out there and was
wondering it would just make more sense to go with plain cameras and
self-host.  I have plenty of storage and can easily run a
container/etc, and PoE networking is no big deal with my setup at this
point.  Decent IP cameras seem to be relatively inexpensive if you
dispense with all the cloud services that can be pretty expensive, to
say nothing of the privacy/etc concerns.

Zoneminder is the one piece of software I'm familiar with.  I have
some questions about its capabilities.

Can it alert me in realtime when there is motion in a monitored zone,
both on my phone and on Google Home?  Ie, somebody walks up to the
front door, and a chime sounds throughout the house or something like
that.  It can't happen 20 minutes later.

Can it record both events and continuous footage?  Ie can I have just
a loop of continuous footage that maybe lasts a few days, and then
have events with motion/etc tagged and retained for longer?  That way
if motion is missed I can still review the footage while not letting
storage get too out of hand?

For footage does it use anything reasonable codec-wise?  I wouldn't
want something super-inefficient like rtjpeg or whatever if I'm going
to record days of full-frame video.

I'm sure I can go ask on one of their forums but I figured I'd start
here and see if anybody is actually using it and what they think...

-- 
Rich
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