Re: [PLUG] Surveillance Security Camera Software

Ahhh streaming video, the bane of my existence.

I'd say the "easy" answer is Zoneminder. The reason for the quotes is due to the fact that Zoneminder is mildly infuriating to OK out of the box. To get it to really purr you need hardware, bandwidth, and time. Look around the web a bit to find docs about setting up ZM on a RPi. In the past, you had to roll your own ffmpeg as it wasn't released for Raspbian/ARM, but that has since changed. Also take a look at Zoneminder offloading transcoding to a GPU.

Other options include:

Shinobi Video which is an interesting project https://shinobi.video/

Frigate geared more towards Home Assistant integration, but still does what you're asking https://frigate.video/

Doesn't matter what you choose, you'll run into exactly what Rich brought up. More pixels/quality means more bandwidth which means more hardware to transcode which means more storage. It's as simple as that, pick the video quality that you're comfortable with and fits your needs (4k is great for reading license plates and seeing faces, 1080 would be enough to identify people you know/don't know), the number of cameras/streams, then size the server/PC/network hardware accordingly.

Something else to bring up, even if you're not recording video constantly, you're still streaming the video constantly to your server.

I went a bit off the rails, cause I've been screwing with security camera/video software for years, albeit in a non-production/non-professional kind of way.

-CT

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 9:20 AM Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 8:45 AM Casey Bralla via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I'm starting to set up a series of home security cameras. The cameras will be a mix of raspberry pi's + commercial cameras. I want to get high resolution videos, so this means I'll be generating a TON of video data, most of which is not interesting.
>
> Zomeminder

So I haven't done this myself, and have contemplated it, and
zoneminder is mostly what I've seen talked about. I'm definitely
interested in whatever anybody is using.

Obviously there are a lot of non-FOSS solutions out there that are cloud based.

One issue with most of these cameras is that I think they don't output
compressed mpeg/etc video, so your server is going to end up
transcoding a lot of video in realtime - or at least transcoding
anything you want to save. So expect it to need a fair bit of CPU.
Obviously the fewer cameras or less resolution you have recording at
once the easier that is. IMO there isn't much point in recording
video if you're just going to get an unrecognizable face and not be
able to make out license plate numbers/etc, so if I did something like
this at all I'd want it to be 1080p or better, with good quality
cameras. Otherwise the video you get might be fun to share on youtube
but that's about it.

You'll also want enough network bandwidth to handle it all. One
camera isn't a big deal but if you have a bunch sending uncompressed
video then you'll need enough bandwidth to get it to wherever it gets
filtered/compressed. That is probably more of an issue if you're
using WiFi, but I haven't looked at the numbers.

I haven't set this up myself so I could be off on some of those
details, but they're all things I'd want to look into. It goes
without saying that you'll want storage/etc to suit your needs.

--
Rich
___________________________________________________________________________
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