Intel NUC as Zoneminder server?

[patpend]

Has anyone tried, or has any thoughts on using an Intel NUC as a Zoneminder platform?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... 0wykh.html

[Mad Professor]

I have seen posts on this forum with people using Intel atom set-ups so I can't see any reason why you could not use a NUC.
But saying that it's all going to come down to what are you needs from the system.

[PacoLM]

Yes, it will work. I'm running a ZM server on an older miniITX board that has a lower performance that this NUC thing.
It depends on your needs, as Mad Professor said, with a NUC I believe you could run a system with 4-6 cameras, many people is running ZM in ARM based devices like BeagleBone black, RaspberryPi, i-Cubox, Odroid U3, etc...if you do not need a really powerful computer and not many cameras, you could save some money...

Hope it helps,

PacoLM

[carcachute]

Depends on your cams. This is my system:

• Atom D510 dual-core 1.66 GHz
• 2GB of RAM
• 120GB SSD (for boot)
• 750GB Western Digital Black 750GB 2.5" (for ZM storage)
• Three D-Link DCS-942L VGA cameras and one DCS-2230 2MP camera

With three 640x480 cams @ 10-15 fps MJPEG, and one 1280x720 @ 15fps H.264, I am able to keep the CPU load hovering around 14% when all monitors are idle. It goes up to about 30% when a channel is recording.

The trick is to use secondary MJPEG streams from each camera (low resolution--320x140, 160x120, etc) at low frame rates (6-7 fps) to perform motion detection, and then record the high-res main streams only when motion is detected on the low-resolution monitors by linking them. Asking ZoneMinder to do motion detection on 720p video and higher is asking a lot of a low-power box.

Unfortunately, recording the video to disk requires decoding it in real-time and saving boatloads of JPEG images in the filesystem. With all four cams recording simultaneously, the CPU goes up to 70% and the hard drive gets absolutely thrashed while ZoneMinder tries to encode and save 50 JPEG files to the hard drive each second. The box is pretty much unresponsive at this point and does drop frames. Fortunately it is rare to have all cams recording at once.

I'm looking to upgrade to some Hik 2032 mini bullets, but they are H.264 only on the main video stream, and ZoneMinder's (legacy) JPEG video storage scheme requires decoding video in real-time. I strongly suspect, through, if the ZoneMinder developers build in the ability to store video directly to the drive without recording, that an Atom or Celeron could easily handle 5-6 1080p cameras and a NUC even more. https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/issues/39

[nkdj]

The trick is to use secondary MJPEG streams from each camera (low resolution--320x140, 160x120, etc) at low frame rates (6-7 fps) to perform motion detection, and then record the high-res main streams only when motion is detected on the low-resolution monitors by linking them. Asking ZoneMinder to do motion detection on 720p video and higher is asking a lot of a low-power box.

Hi! I'm new to Zoneminder. How do you link the high-res recording to the motion-detecting low-res stream? Thank you.

Regards,
Neil