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)
This question is related to
video-streaming
video-capture
ip-camera
surveillance
The answer is
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
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
Why don't you consider www.cameraftp.com? it supports image upload and online viewer
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://<IPADDRESS>/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.
Source: Stackoverflow.com