ZoneMinder Forums

So tonight one of my neighbors demo'ed his 1080p HD IP security camera setup and wow, those were some nice videos, especially compared to the stuff I'm getting with my 650TVL analog cameras on Bluecherry cards.

I'm thinking about replacing a couple of the analog cameras with IP HD models, but I'm not sure what specs to look for to ensure ZoneMinder compatibility...I'm seeing all sorts of protocols like RTSP, etc. and I'm not sure which ones work best with ZoneMinder.

Any advice would be appreciated! Fortunately I ran CAT6 for all the analog cameras with baluns instead of coax, so changing them out won't be too difficult physically.

The ability to provide jpg or mjpeg make it a certainty to work with zm.

Many others will work too - rtsp or http, mpeg4 or h264 - best thing is to find something that you think might work and ask in here.

Note that jumping from 320x240 to 1080p will increase load on your server a lot, at least 8 times as much work is needed to process an image. ZM can do it, but you may need to tweak shared memory.

Does ZM do any actual processing if stuff like motion detection is turned off, or is it required just to process the images as they come in?

I have dual quad-core Xeon processors with 16gb of ram in the machine currently. Load with 8 analog cameras at 640x480 usually runs around .6. I'm thinking of adding 1-3 HD IP cameras. I would guess there's enough processing overhead available for that, but what are your thoughts?

I'm just beginning my camera search, but so far it looks like the market is either inexpensive no-name Chinese stuff (mostly H.264 RTSP) or the more expensive commercial stuff, from Axis/Geovision/etc.

I have 8 cameras, 4 1280*740@10FPS and 4 640*480@8FPS the load is < 2.5 on a 4 core... you have 8 cores... there is plenty of room for more cameras...

As long as your drives can take the througput

Yipes! Drives -- would have never thought of a hard drive as a potential limiter, but that's a very good point. Thanks for sharing that.