Zoneminder for IP Camera Control?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,072
973
113
NYC
Is anyone here using Zoneminder for their IP cameras?

It looks slick ZoneMinder - Features

I'm looking for camera control software and I don't really want to do buy a QNAP or Synology then pay for the license.
 

StammesOpfer

Active Member
Mar 15, 2016
383
136
43
I was looking a while back, I don't remember why I didn't like Zoneminder. Blue Iris was what I decided was the way to go. It is not free but it has a trial and is a 1 time cost $50-60. Give both a shot see what you like. Might come down to Windows vs Linux.
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
3,184
1,545
113
I use BI. Reasonably happy.

Likes: Rock solid, stable, reasonably full feature set, decent mobile app support.

Dislikes: I generally hate Windows, its a CPU pig (yes - you can tune it - but there are plenty of commercial examples of doing similar work with lighter CPU load).

On the balance, as far as I have found, there is actually nothing better on the market for the price.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DavidVermillion

Deslok

Well-Known Member
Jul 15, 2015
1,122
125
63
34
deslok.dyndns.org
I use BI. Reasonably happy.

Likes: Rock solid, stable, reasonably full feature set, decent mobile app support.

Dislikes: I generally hate Windows, its a CPU pig (yes - you can tune it - but there are plenty of commercial examples of doing similar work with lighter CPU load).

On the balance, as far as I have found, there is actually nothing better on the market for the price.
I'll second the cpu requirements, although they're experimenting with gpu encoding finally, might be interesting to see how the new VDI xeon's work when they get that finalized
 

JeffroMart

Member
Jun 27, 2014
61
18
8
45
The key to CPU performance is to use the cameras to show the overlays, and not use the overlays inside of BlueIris itself, that way it doesn't have to encode. Once you remove the encoding the CPU usage is very low.
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
3,184
1,545
113
The key to CPU performance is to use the cameras to show the overlays, and not use the overlays inside of BlueIris itself, that way it doesn't have to encode. Once you remove the encoding the CPU usage is very low.
Like I said in my comment - there are ways to tune it. But frankly you shouldn't have to - the work being done really doesn't require as much CPU as BI uses to do it.

Yes, you can:
  • Use direct to disk recording (but then you can't optimize the format of what is recorded...you get what the camera sends)
  • Along with D2D do any test overlays in the camera (but then you have to make sure everything else is perfect, like having the time set on the camera perfectly and without drift, and its hard to do dynamic overlays like weather info "in the camera").
  • Lower the camera frame rates (but then you get lower quality video)
  • Etc...
Etc., etc. You can deal with some of the CPU loading by tuning. But you really shouldn't have to.

It also helps to run "as a service" and then never pull up their GUI at all. Web access is much less of a load. I actually run mine headless as a VM on my server farm so the BI GUI is rarely used except when modifying the setup.

Don't misunderstand - I like BI. It is the best thing I've found for the job (beats out higher priced options for features and capabilities). But it is a CPU pig.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Patrick

craigdabbs

New Member
Jan 9, 2017
24
0
1
42
Xeoma in Linux for me, really good on resources out of all the ones I tried.

Sent from my MI 5 using Tapatalk