Greetings. I have ZoneMinder running on a recycled Linux laptop (Fedora Core 2 on a Dell Inspiron 4000). Since it has only one USB port and dicey support for the Philips webcam (Logitech Quickcam Zoom), I've put the cameras on Windows hardware and set ZM to pull images from them as "remote" sources.
The software I've used for setting up network cameras:
- Palantir at http://www.fastpath.it/products/palantir/ is a Linux-based GPL'd camera server. The Linux server with a Windows native client is stunningly fast on a LAN. Set palantir in single-frame mode to use with ZM.
Dorgem at http://dorgem.sourceforge.net/ is a Windows-based open-source webcam for Windows. It has a few neat capture features, but the useful one for ZM remoting is the web server feature which can grab a single frame (set the duration to 0 seconds).
The load on my lowly Dell laptop dropped substantially once the image capture work was moved to another machine with ZM fetching images over the LAN. Granted, the frame rate had to be reduced from 10FPS to 3FPS, but for our purposes it works fine at that speed. I someday hope to obtain some real hardware for ZM to run on; until then, several "recycled" PCs each running a different piece of ZoneMinder handle things quite well.
