Recording video feed from an IP camera over a network

Question

I am building a camera security system for my office however we do not want to keep the DVR on site   We looked at NVR  network video recorders  and they are too expensive  I thought of an alternative to this  I do not know how much feasible it is but would surely like some inputs here   Here are my thoughts     Buy a regular IP camera Buy a server or an AWS instance and write a program to download the streaming feed continuously to the server    Now I have some questions about the practicality of this solution and the technicalities involved with building such a system     What format do most IP cameras stream feeds in   What frame rates are they transferred at     If i were to write a program that could read this feed and download it and store it on a server  will I get the same quality as a live feed   Will I need to again encode the data realtime to some other format  like flv   before i store it    Can you suggest a best possible architecture for this   I was thinking an amazon instance and s3 for storage of video feeds     There are some sites which already do this  like http   www mangocam com    Thanks and I hope this question meets the SO guidelines since this might be a gray area between programming and non-programming related  If not  I ll move it to some other stackexchange site  suggestions please

User · Answer

Motion is an alternative to Zoneminder  It has a steeper setup curve as everything is configured via config files However  the config files are nicely commented and it s easier than it sounds  It s very reliable once running as well   To add a Foscam camera  mentioned above  use the following syntax to stream the video from the camera   netcam url http    lt IPADDRESS gt  videostream cgi user admin pwd    Where the user is admin with a blank password  the default for Foscam cameras    For really high uptime reliablity consider using a monitoring tool such as Monit  This works well with Motion

User · Answer

Why don t you consider www cameraftp com  it supports image upload and online viewer

User · Answer

I haven t used it yet but I would take a look at http   www zoneminder com  The documentation explains you can install it on a modest machine with linux and use IP cameras for remote recording   Andrew

User · Answer

about 3 years ago i needed cctv  I found zoneminder  tried to edit it to my liking  but found i was fixing it more than editing it   Not to mention mp4 recording feature isn t actually part of the master branch  which is kind of lol  since its a cctv program and its already been about 3 years or more since it was suggested   Its literally just adapting the ffmpeg command lol   So i found the solution      If you want something done right  do it yourself    I present to you Shinobi  Shinobi   The Open Source CCTV Platform

[video-streaming] Recording video feed from an IP camera over a network

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