Hello! I'm new to ZoneMinder and a friend of mine has asked me to implement a video surveillance system in his little store. I'd like to give ZM a try. But before this i would like to ask if it's possible to implement the following configuration:
Let's have two machines: one in the store (Guard) and one at owner's home (Boss). They are connected via LAN (he lives nearby). The Guard is supposed to be fully-automated keyboardless and monitorless machine, its task is to:
1. Monitor one (or several) USB cameras for a motion.
2. Trigger an alarm on the object if intrusion is detected.
3. Start video recording in such a case.
The Boss machine should run some kind of client. Client's task is to:
1. Monitor any camera(s) on the Guard and display in on the screen at any time.
2. Listen for events from Guard and trigger a local alarm at home in such a case.
3. Start recording video streamed from the Guard at the same time when Guard starts recording.
Are such networked setup possible? Of course Boss is a Windows machine and this is not subject to change.
Listening for events from Guard and recording video on the Boss is a very important part having impact on the system's robustness in a whole. It's not enough just to transfer MPEG files via scp/rsync/ftp/whatever after they are recorded - in case of intrusion the object (at least a computer system on it) can be turned off, stolen, or physically destroyed before it stops recording, and the post-mortal video should stay on the remote machine in such a case.
I guess i'll have to implement remote alarm triggering myself via my own software and hardware and this is not a problem for me (i'm a UNIX/C/hardware programmer/engineer for ~10 years). The tricky part is streaming a video (i'm completely new to this). At home i have a Debian DVD set and i've tested another program called Motion on my Pegasos PowerPC Linux machine. Motion is also able to stream video via HTTP protocol in a form of multipart JPEG, however even localhost tests gave very bad results. I've concluded that a web browser is not capable of displaying such a video stream in realtime (it is simply not what web browser is for) - if i set FPS >= 1 Firefox just keeps loading a stream and doesn't have any time to render and display it. I guess the same problem expects me if i try to use ZM's web stream server (i've read in the documentation that it uses the same protocol). At the same time i've got acceptable results when i tried just to stream MPEG4 video (software-compressed) from my USB cam using VLC via both HTTP and RTSP protocols.
Can i do something like this with ZM ? May be i can pipe a video stream to external encoder (the same VLC for example) which will produce streams readable by Windows Media Player (or some other Windows video player)? Or some other good video player for Windows?
ZoneMinder networked setup
Everything but the built in recording to a remote system live is built in. The simplest way I see to do that is to mount a network attached storage system for the zoneminder system. That or since zoneminder saves each frame individually, there should be some way to upload each file as it is written...