Computer HW

[mcgeek]

I am putting together a shopping list for the computer I will install ZM on. Will this system have enough punch?

AM1 system with a AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini quad core.
2 TB video drive. I will have a small SSD for the system.
A mix of 4-5 of the following cameras. TRENDnet TV-IP320PI and TV-IP420P.

I hate having a system heating my basement without enough to do. Should I get a beefier system?

Thanks

McGeek

[EdwinDrood]

Recording video to a hard drive does not take a lot of beef. In general, here is what takes cpu cycles:

• Encoding Video (to H.264 or M-Jpeg)

• Motion Detection

In olden days -- before IP cameras, folks would buy expensive encoding cards to offload the encoding from the main computer to the fairly powerful chips on the cards. If, however, you instead had more "raw" video coming into the computer, you would need to use software (and a lot of CPU) to encode the video.

Old analog cameras do not have any motion detection built-in. All motion detection had to be done by your recording software.

That being said... IP cameras typically do the encoding and motion detection for you. Expensive, high-quality IP cameras do motion detection very well. (ZM has a script to read camera's MD). Cheap IP cameras typically do not do motion detection accurately. (use ZM for MD with Trendnet cameras )

I have no experience with Trendnet cameras, but since they are doing the H.254 encoding for you just need to record that (15 fps is PLENTY). Use the substream m-Jpeg at a lower frame rate just for the motion detect.

See this post on using an Intel NUC with an atom processor for a recorder:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=22542&p=85815