IP Camera Recommendations

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epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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Thanks for your feedback @Aestr. I would love to have time to play more with Shinobi but its still quite far from the finished product. Will try out BI trial.
I have a dual E5 2670 X9 MB in an SM 836 rack. What kind of resources do you think should i cater for a Win (win 10 or Win Server?) VM for say 15 cameras recording 24/7, 5-10FPS, 1MP resolution?
 

Aestr

Well-Known Member
Oct 22, 2014
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Seattle
It has been over a year since I moved out of my house with cameras so I don't have a great answer to give you. I always found the folks over at the BI section of IPcamtalk to be quite helpful so give them a shot.

Blue Iris

edit: Your intended settings also seem quite reasonable.
 

Aestr

Well-Known Member
Oct 22, 2014
967
386
63
Seattle
I got myself looking at the forums again and found this tool

Blue Iris Update Helper

You calculate your total MP/s using (# of cams)*(resolution)*(framerate), so yours would be 150 MP/s

If you sort their list by MP/s you can find a bunch in that range and you'll see that most don't seem to have high CPU usage. It might take a bit of figuring on the compute power of those CPUs vs your 2670, but still I think it should ease your fears.
 
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matt_garman

Active Member
Feb 7, 2011
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it definitely has custom region based motion detection, I can't remember specifically if you can create multiple regions on one feed but I would think you can. If not, I'm sure the dev would be receptive to it (he's implemented everything else people have asked for so far, it's quite new software)
Side anecdote: I used MythTV as a DVR/media PC app for probably over a decade. It always felt "fragile" to me, and once I got it working, I was afraid to touch for fear of breaking it again. Someone on this forum suggested Plex Media Center as a replacement. At first I was like, "nah, the devil you know is better than the one you don't." But curiosity got the best of me, and let me just say that I'm now a lifetime Plex Pass subscriber!

Unfortunately, the experience with ZoneMinder versus Shinobi was not the same. I gave Shinobi a fair shake, but in the end, it just felt way too "beta" for me. It's funny how people seem to either love or hate any given video surveillance platform. Before I ever even tried ZM, I was pretty scared, as there are a lot of negative stories about it on the net... but my experience has been remarkably good. The software has just worked as I expected, and all the while been completely stable.

My only complaint with ZM is the very real CPU- and IO-heavy aspect of its architecture. My cameras output h.264 native streams, and yet ZM converts this to a series of JPEGs. While I'm not hurting for compute resources, I'm always game for efficiency (and a power bill reduction). That is what convinced me to give Shinobi a try.

Sadly, it just didn't cut it for me. I found numerous cases where the documentation was incomplete or woefully outdated. For example, using sqlite instead of mysql, the different stream formats in the web gui, motion detection. It appears to me motion detection is now builtin to the software, but can also be done through one or more plugins. There's no discussion of the pros/cons of the various methods or to help one decide how to choose. The motion detection doc is terse at best, has no screenshots or examples... it could be as powerful as ZM's, but without screenshots or more detailed docs, there's no way to know short of trying it all. So much for a "quick test".

The web interface for me was terribly flaky. Feeds would randomly go black for no apparent reason. Different stream types would be more reliable, but some would cause a dramatic CPU load that was even worse than ZM. This doesn't inspire confidence.


I have quite a bit of cameras (axis cameras putting out h264), and since I have shinobi set to "stream copy" storage method, it just straight dumps the native h264 streams to disk. no encode/transcode, so vm load is essentially zero (just some disk writes)
So it sounds like you're not using motion detection? That's the killer feature for me for ZM. These days I only periodically spot-check my cameras (as I'm fortunate to live in a neighborhood where cameras really aren't necessary), but when I do---or if there ever was an actual incident---it's nice to have the footage "pre filtered" by the motion detection algorithm. It leaves me with footage of only potentially interesting events, rather than countless hours of complete inactivity.
 

Wader

New Member
Dec 16, 2015
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I tried ZM and, if I recall correctly, I had trouble getting it to find the streams from the cameras. I tried several of the other applications too, using both Windows and Ubuntu as the host and Windows, Ubuntu and Android viewing applications. Sorry I don't recall details, but overall with these cameras I prefer Xeoma. I do wish the Android app allowed more flexibility in video size and speed, so I will be listening in here and maybe try one of the other apps again some day.
 

matt_garman

Active Member
Feb 7, 2011
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With all the camera packages I've used, I've always manually entered the stream URL. Shinobi actually has a giant list of stream URLs for cameras. Some can also be found in the Zoneminder forums or Wiki. Decent cameras should provide you with the stream URLs in their documentation.

But, VLC can read rstp streams. With any camera package, save yourself a lot of grief by first validating the stream URL in VLC.