Zoneminder is a pretty solid setup for IP security cameras, and the zmninja app is really nice too. I had tried it years ago but got back to it recently with some sketchy IP cameras. I just put them in their own VLAN, no Internet access, Zoneminder does motion detection and event recording, and so far I’m quite pleased with it.
+1 for Zoneminder, I ran one for years.
I’m all about Frigate now. It can use a GPU or Edge TPU to inference humans, cars & animals on modect events.
Frigate is next level. Didn’t even have to change the IP cams.
That’s kinda cool. I don’t have good GPUs on this server though, it’s an old R720.
Zoneminder is best for a low-power system. In the last year or so, it got proper passthrough support so it can record video straight off the camera with zero processing. You don’t get alarms or motion detection or live view, but you can record 24x7 using 2% of your CPU.
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If you get a camera with built in detection like a Reolink I think you can trigger off the camera alarm. It is not easy though, takes some scripting. It is not great but better than nothing.
I set up a low res feed on Modect and use that to trigger recording the event on the second high res camera channel on Nodect, that keeps the CPU usage reasonable.
If you csn, try to source a Coral AI USB TPU. Should cost around USD $60. Be patient, and backorder it. Don’t overpay.
I’m not saying seeedstore [sic]… But maybe they can scare them up sometimes.
I’m a big fan of scrypted. I moved to that from Frigate. Not regrets, easier to setup and use.
While frigate is every bit as capable, I got tired of tinkering with it or it breaking with my install when I updated it.
No issues this far with scrypted.
Can scrypted record only when there is movement? I didn’t see about it in the documentation.
As of right now, no. It’s relatively new as I understand. The feature to record only events is a planned addition. As of right now it records 24/7 and records events. I have 7 cameras currently set up, a 7 day set of recordings takes about 1.5TB. This includes many 1080P and 2K resolution cameras.
Again no I’ll intent towards frigate, I needed something more plug and play and LOVE the plug-in functionality of it as well. I’m also already using it for HomeKit integration so it was an easy transition to making it my frigate replacement.
Eh. Frigate+Shinobi on Docker has been the simplest solution I’ve found. ZoneMinder was always difficult. BlueIris was a resource hog.
No docker images for zoneminder still which is wild.
I use ispy agent dvr at the moment. I used to use Blue Iris.
Zoneminder is packaged in Opensuse which I run. Just deployed and set the database configuration and that was it.
What made you switch?
Currently using Blue Iris.
I despise having to run windows for blue iris.
I was tired of maintaining a Windows VM specifically for Blue Iris and I wanted something I could run in my Kubernetes cluster. Zoneminder was immediately out, Frigate is all around useless, shinobi’s UI is terrible, Blue Cherry has an inconsistent UI and Kerberos Agent made my camera crash. That left ISpy Agent DVR. It took a bit of work to only record when Deepstack detected someone but it’s been great.
Windows users will want to check out BlueIris
Otherwise, Synology has a great surveillance package, but you only get 2 cameras licenses with your NAS and more licenses are like $50 each
I have blue iris and half a dozen cameras. My blue iris support has expired, and because of a notifications bug I can’t get notifications anymore unless I upgrade for another year. How does zoneminder compare to blue iris and deepastack? Is it worth switching? It looks like zoneminder is free. Are there any other costs involved?
I love motion eye for being super simple. It doesn’t have many advanced features but is much less finicky than Zm/shinobi.
Yes! I have been running Zoneminder since 2020 with no complaints.
For first time/new users I would suggest one thing, try it in a VM first and take notes. Some of the settings take a little tweaking and when you have it all hammered out you can just follow your notes to set up your production machine. When I upgraded my server I was able to set up a brand new ZM instance with 8 cameras in about a half hour because I had my notes.
I was going to try Zoneminder but it seemed hard to setup on a raspberry pi. I’ve been super happy with Shinobi though
ZoneMinder does not run on any, and is incompatible with, all versions of Windows. We have no plans to support Windows.
Well, ok then :(
I ran ZoneMinder for years before buying a Reolink NVM and now I couldn’t be happier. I’m a huge self-host-er but unless you want to babysit it ZoneMinder is a pain to self host. I ran it in docker, I ran it on raw metal, I tried multiple plugins/configs. Nothing beat the plug and play of a Reolink NVM. I say this as someone with multiple servers and ~150TB of storage locally.
Skip the headache and buy something off the shelf for this.
