20 POE Camera System

[Tuxxin]

I've been working on setting up a 20 POE IP Camera system and am new to ZM so please bare with me. I do have a strong Linux background and have the POE IP Cameras mounted and working well. I started with an old Pentium D system that was only capable of running 2 cameras at a time (1920x1080 @ 30 FPS). The new system I'm working with is a Dual Xeon hex core 2.4ghz with 24gb's of ram and currently only running a single WD Purple 4TB drive.

The problems I'm running into is the insane amount of storage space being taken up with my tests on a single camera. Running at 720p 60FPS, I'm eating 100Gb's a day per camera which only allows for about 2 days of archives. We do want the cameras to record 24/7 unless we're able to make motion detection recording stable enough for production use, we've had bad experiences with this in the past.

My question:
What are your suggestions?
I see that the cameras take photos (so I'm assuming @ 60 FPS, 60 JPG's per sec per channel). Is it beneficial to convert these to MPEG/MP4's and removing the raw photos? Is this possible in real time with ZM?
What FPS do you suggest?

I appreciate you taking the time to read this and look forward to a response.

[Vezbim]

Hi,

Fairly new to ZoneMinder too, but I have an installation up and running so I have some experience. I think you are thinking of ZoneMinder as a network video recorder, but it's not. You can, but due to the JPEG storage nature, it's very space consuming.

I too initally started with a high frame rate, 30 fps and thought wow, this is great. But as I added another camera I quickly saw my CPU (2x Intel Xeon @ 2 GHz) almost went up in flames (using motion analysis). I kept lowering and lowering the framerate and now I'm down to 4 FPS for 4 cameras (all 1920x1080) and I'd say that's good enough, and my CPU usage is stable.

[Tuxxin]

I figured I would just need to play with the settings and see what works best. I will try 10FPS at 1080P and see how I stand.

I'm thinking it would be ideal to come up with a method of converting these JPG's into actual MP4's for archive purposes. Maybe once a day at midnight, convert them into video files and remove the images. h.264 has to work better than thousands of large JPG files.

[.wm.]

Are you really need so many FPS? Criminals must be very fast over there

For razor sharp video you need fast exposure time (set on the camera), not lots of FPS.

[Tuxxin]

Are you really need so many FPS? Criminals must be very fast over there

For razor sharp video you need fast exposure time (set on the camera), not lots of FPS.

What FPS would you suggest? We want smooth running videos.

[.wm.]

Relatively smooth videos would be 15 fps. I'm usually using 5 fps.
It's business here, eye candy is not needed. Or rather you can see the little jumps, but the video quality is godlike anyway.

Analysis FPS, and video FPS are two different things. Analysis FPS = 5, video FPS = 15 saves a lot of processor power.

Those jpegs are not raw, mine are quality=70, and additional compression (without conversion to video) will not give you much space.

But converting to video should save space, especially with a large keyframe_interval - because they will be compressed in time too, but I don't know if it is worth it .
You can convert jpegs with something like:

ffmpeg -start_number n -i capture_%d.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 out.avi

but this needs processor power too.

I have 15 cameras, mostly 2048x1536, motions detection, 8TB drive, and all that is sufficient for a month, I think.

[Sp9239]

.wm

Hello!

I am new to Zoneminder and found your discussion interesting.
However, I am looking into replacing my 16 channel DVR with Zoneminder based system.

I would require the system on motion record
And Live View of all cams on up to four PC's.

Can you guys give me suggestion on what capture card to use for the IP cameras.

Thanks!

[Tuxxin]

.wm

Hello!

I am new to Zoneminder and found your discussion interesting.
However, I am looking into replacing my 16 channel DVR with Zoneminder based system.

I would require the system on motion record
And Live View of all cams on up to four PC's.

Can you guys give me suggestion on what capture card to use for the IP cameras.

Thanks!

Capture cards are not required with IP cameras, they just simply connect into the network and ZM accesses them via the feed information you setup.

[Sp9239]

Thank You!
Also, any suggestion on IP based cameras?

I am looking into something low resolution
With one or two MP.

Sam