| Keith via plug on 12 Jan 2021 15:22:16 -0800 |
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| Re: [PLUG] ZoneMinder / Alternatives |
On 1/12/21 3:36 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
Yes you get a hyperlink which I really like because its foolproof that way. As long as I am on my VPN, I can pull the event for that alert quickly. Near real time I would say is less than 10 seconds depending on how you have it set up. That's not too bad but what I really want to do is have OH pick up the alarm and then alert me in the mobile app or if I have the OH website / panel up, alert me there. I know it can be done, I just haven't gotta around too it since the text messaging provides an acceptable amount of time for me to respond to a situation for now but I do want to get it into the 2 to 3 second range.On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 3:05 PM Keith via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:On 1/12/21 1:59 PM, Rich Freeman via plug wrote: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.Yes to all your questions though I can't talk about Google Home. Alerts to your "phone"... that's a bit ambiguous. You can get those emailed / texted to you but they may be other options.Text would work especially if it can hyperlink to playback the event or otherwise get me there fast, and if delivery is near-realtime. I guess any kind of app monitoring is going to be more resource-intensive on the phone side, so text might be a good option. I think there are android front-ends, and if the text message could integrate with that to quickly pull it up that would be nice. I'll have to look into sounding chimes/alerts on Google Home.
LFS bandwidth is a thing generally but what I would say is that if you like your LFS performance now then ZM using it should not be an issue.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?Yes to both and I do both type of events. You can archive events too so that they are not deleted but I haven't done that yet. If you have the space, I say use it. YMMV of course, since it depends on you are trying to do in your environment. My ZM runs on my LizardFS cluster and right now is still in a 1Tb container since I haven't need to expand it yet but I'm sure I will.Good to hear. I'll probably also use lizardfs so space really isn't much of a concern, though bandwidth could be since my nodes are lower-power. But video isn't that bad if you're just streaming it and not seeking a lot.
It could be but I don't think so. Containers are more lightweight but if you need cores, you need cores. There was a noticeable improvement when I upped the core count. If I had to make a rule thumb- 2 cores per camera would be a good starting point. RAM is very much another consideration since rendering video for playback needs it. Once I added the 4k cams, that became necessary if I recall correctly.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...Typical codecs... ZM isn't doing x265 yet but it does does x264 pass through which is what I'm using. Many cams offer MJPEG primary or sub streams but I don't use them.Ok, yeah, if ZM is doing its own encoding I could see that getting CPU-expensive.I will say this... I'm running it as a VM and I started out with 2 cores / 4Gb RAM and now I'm up to 8 cores with 8Gb RAM. I have a 720p door intercom and 2 4k color night vision cams so far. Long story short. ZM need a a good amount of resources. The busier your system is the more you would probably need, especially if you are running continuous, are normally reviewing events or monitoring the system live.Yeah, that is sounding like more than what I usually do with containers. I guess I could just get one camera and play with it and see how it goes. I'd be using containers which are more lightweight than VMs, but if it really needs multiple GB of RAM that is something I'd have to plan for.
Remember you're not encoding since you are doing x264 pass-through :) but a gaming PC would be a great place to start.I actually have my old gaming PC sitting around mining ETH right now since I'm not sure what I want to do with it. That is a little dated and suboptimal, but probably plenty for this sort of thing, especially if it can do NVIDIA GPU encoding.
Definitely a consideration on the stealing of footage from the local server point of view but there a couple of way to handle that. One obvious option would be syncing events to offsite storage. That doesn't specifically require "cloud" and there are straightforward ways to do that.I would say, compared to the mainstream offerings out there, ZM offers the same functionality and can do that across a wide array of cameras. Most security device companies are talking the cloud route and it the implementations are not going well for a myriad of reasons.Yeah, for one device the ease of use for the average consumer is going to be a selling point, but I have these concerns with most of the options: 1. Expensive up-front. They're getting you on the blades AND the razor it seems. 2. Ongoing subscription. Now, cloud-based is actually good for security since they can't steal your footage, but you're paying a lot of money for often not much data retention.
This is a huge point... On prem, those 4k streams are only limited by the space I have and when something goes wrong... I can't even begin to tell you how good 4k looks... and in my case- it looks as good at 2pm as it does at 2am. There's not that much difference in price difference but mainstream security cameras are definitely doing to be more that the consumer stuff. Buy once, cry once.3. Limited quality usually - I doubt the cloud services want to be storing high-quality 4k footage for a month or whatever. That gets expensive. 4. Bandwidth use. Multiple cameras + cloud either means they're only storing data in the cloud for events, or your internet connection is sending a ton of data 24x7. If those cameras use your WiFi that is also a significant load.
I started looking at the Unifi stuff too at one point but as much as I like their products the I just abhor vendor lock-in or systems that don't have offerings open enough for people to create the solutions they want.5. Lock-in. Those cameras are paperweights if you decide to stop using that vendor's service, usually. 6. LImited options. You might have a few camera options from any of the consumer-oriented vendors. With ZM you can mix/match which means that you can pick the right solution for each location. There are hybrid solutions like UniFi Protect which stores the data on your drives and I don't think it has any subscription, but it does provide remote access via an app/etc. Those might make sense for power-users who don't want to deal with full DIY. However, these usually don't support stuff like NAS/RAID/etc so storage is going to be limited and failure-prone.
Thanks for the tips! That, and the vote of confidence for ZM.
Sure thing. Feel free to ping me off-list if necessary. -- ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Keith C. Perry, MS E.E. Managing Member, DAO Technologies LLC (O) +1.215.525.4165 x2033 (M) +1.215.432.5167 www.daotechnologies.com ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug