On Thursday, February 24, 2011 08:25:35 pm Chuck Munro wrote:
> Open-source software such as ZoneMinder works with cameras from several
> manufacturers, and runs on CentOS. I personally haven't tried it, but I
> understand it works well.
I'm running a zoneminder instance on CentOS 5 under VMware ESX now; there are a few caveats.
First, I didn't find RPM's for ZoneMinder for CentOS for the current version of ZoneMinder. For F12, F13, and F14 they're out there, but niether EPEL/RPMfusion nor RPMforge has them that I could find; but I didn't look in any testing repos, just the production stable ones. Even ATrpms doesn't package ZoneMinder for C5.
So I built from source. This has some odd dependencies, for a specific version of libraries needed. It builds ok, but it does take some work to do. I'm tempted to take the Fedora source RPM and try it, one day when I have time to do that, as it will likely need some patching (but I'm not sure of that, since I haven't tried it).
Once built and the database configured and the schema loaded, it works fine. However, if you're using a lot of IP cameras and a high frame rate, you need a lot of CPU power. If you set the frame rate to 1 frame per second the CPU utilization with eight or nine cameras isn't too bad; trying to do 5-10 frames per second takes nearly 100% of a dual vCPU VMware ESX instance on our Dell PE6950's (four 2.8GHz dual-core Opterons).
ZM can take all kinds of video inputs; it can even 'chain' to another zoneminder instance as if the other zm instance was an IP camera. So you could build a multichannel NTSC or PAL video capture box for cheap CCTV cameras (monochrome CCTV cams with C or CS-mount interchangeable lenses can be had for way less than $100 each), and then chain that to another zoneminder.
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