ZoneMinder Forums

Hi guys,
First of all I'd like to thank all developers who build a such useful and wonderful application and this community for supporting it !

I'm trying ,experimenting with Zoneminder since one week ago and I found that really good and I'd say superior to an DVR that a friend of mine bought 2 years ago.
I'd like to suggest him to make an upgrade(the DVR lacks too many feature Zoneminder offers) it terms of reusing as much as possible the old hardware.
The cameras are analog ones and I'm not sure what would be best among these alternatives :

1) Purchase a Video Capture Card with 8 Channels,buy an used PC and install Zoneminder
2) Reuse the old DVR and stream to Zoneminder

For the option one please suggest any mid level PCI (PCI-E) card which has been proven to work with Linux.
For the option 2 please suggest any high level guidance or document how to capture streams from DVR . To use them as camera input looks easy.

Thanks a lot in advance for your suggestions and help !

Kind regards
Kozmi

I would not bother with a PCI capture card. Instead, you can use an IP video encoder. See the wiki for the current hardware recommendations https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Hardware_Compatibility_List.

Streaming from the DVR is also a good option if it is compatible with ZM. Read the user manual of the DVR and see if it offers an RTSP stream. You can also possibly use Zmodopipe https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Zmodopipe, though compatibility is only with a few DVRs and it may or may not be reliable. In the latter case, you should just go with the video encoder above.

Many thanks indeed for your suggestions !
Really appreciated it


Kind regards
Kozmi