Jayce
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Has anybody tinkered with ZoneMinder? I recently got interested in it and began to use it. I'm growing to like it quite a bit, but I don't have it working in full blown production quite yet.
What happened was we began to realize we were missing some fish out of the pond out back. I'm talking like 14" fish... I decided to rig up some sort of video surveillance on the pond. Since I always wanted to have a camera, I decided not to cheap out and use some temporary setup but to actually get a real camera. So I utilized some Amazon gift card money and picked up a TRENDnet IP110wn camera. It's an IP based camera with wireless N integrated as well as ethernet. Very slick unit. I gotta admit, I was insanely ****ed off though when I saw their built in software for motion detection required ActiveX controls. I mean, really? What kind of bad joke is this to require IE anymore. I couldn't resist, and emailed TRENDnet. Anywhoo, the device itself is really nice and since I'm using ZoneMinder, their built in software is useless to me at this point (not to mention the web UI was kind of clunky and slow).
ZoneMinder seems to be very feature packed. From what I read, the creator of ZoneMinder was robbed, so he came up with this program and released it as free and open source. You can create motion detected zones. For example, if your zone has the street and your driveway in the same shot, you can exclude the street area from the motion detected area so that way it only trips the motion detection and begins recording if something in your zone moves.
ZoneMinder works by taking tons of pictures. It doesn't record actual video, but just dozens of .jpg snapshots continually. From what I read, the vast majority of video surveillance systems do this to save space, since true video is much larger. You can however watch a live feed of the camera if you know the direct mjpeg stream. My plan is to use ZoneMinder 247 for motion detection, but then also keep a handy little link to the mjpeg feed so if I want to watch it live in real time, I can.
The only downside to ZoneMinder is it seems to be just THAT feature packed, it can be a little confusing. There are tons of settings that confused the **** out of me. Luckily the developers clued me in on a little hint: For USB cams, PAL + YUYV are the most optimal settings. Likewise, if your higher resolution camera isn't displaying anything, raise your shared memory in Linux. This is all from their wiki, by the way.
It worked out perfectly for me, really. Since I recently stopped using FreeNAS and began using Ubuntu for my file server, I realized that my NAS would be the perfect ZoneMinder box. I mean, after all, I have 300gb of unused space sitting in a mirror. Perfect! So I created a folder on that array and let www-data have permission to it. ZoneMinder is set up now and should be good to go. My only issue now is finding a spot for the camera... The garage is just.. barely.. far.. enough.. away.. that I can't get wireless to it. I may have to get my hands on a cheap access point and put that on the edge of the house.
What happened was we began to realize we were missing some fish out of the pond out back. I'm talking like 14" fish... I decided to rig up some sort of video surveillance on the pond. Since I always wanted to have a camera, I decided not to cheap out and use some temporary setup but to actually get a real camera. So I utilized some Amazon gift card money and picked up a TRENDnet IP110wn camera. It's an IP based camera with wireless N integrated as well as ethernet. Very slick unit. I gotta admit, I was insanely ****ed off though when I saw their built in software for motion detection required ActiveX controls. I mean, really? What kind of bad joke is this to require IE anymore. I couldn't resist, and emailed TRENDnet. Anywhoo, the device itself is really nice and since I'm using ZoneMinder, their built in software is useless to me at this point (not to mention the web UI was kind of clunky and slow).
ZoneMinder seems to be very feature packed. From what I read, the creator of ZoneMinder was robbed, so he came up with this program and released it as free and open source. You can create motion detected zones. For example, if your zone has the street and your driveway in the same shot, you can exclude the street area from the motion detected area so that way it only trips the motion detection and begins recording if something in your zone moves.
ZoneMinder works by taking tons of pictures. It doesn't record actual video, but just dozens of .jpg snapshots continually. From what I read, the vast majority of video surveillance systems do this to save space, since true video is much larger. You can however watch a live feed of the camera if you know the direct mjpeg stream. My plan is to use ZoneMinder 247 for motion detection, but then also keep a handy little link to the mjpeg feed so if I want to watch it live in real time, I can.
The only downside to ZoneMinder is it seems to be just THAT feature packed, it can be a little confusing. There are tons of settings that confused the **** out of me. Luckily the developers clued me in on a little hint: For USB cams, PAL + YUYV are the most optimal settings. Likewise, if your higher resolution camera isn't displaying anything, raise your shared memory in Linux. This is all from their wiki, by the way.
It worked out perfectly for me, really. Since I recently stopped using FreeNAS and began using Ubuntu for my file server, I realized that my NAS would be the perfect ZoneMinder box. I mean, after all, I have 300gb of unused space sitting in a mirror. Perfect! So I created a folder on that array and let www-data have permission to it. ZoneMinder is set up now and should be good to go. My only issue now is finding a spot for the camera... The garage is just.. barely.. far.. enough.. away.. that I can't get wireless to it. I may have to get my hands on a cheap access point and put that on the edge of the house.
