Bandwidth / IP cameras

[shoetick]

I have several stores I am installing cameras in. My boss wants everyone to be able to view the cameras from remote. Each location either has DSL or cable. So, I really can't allow everyone to view the cameras from the IP cameras themselves. What I want is for the zoneminder server to be the only machine to pull the feed and then redistribute it to whomever wants to watch from there. Is this indeed how zoneminder works or can be setup or does ZM create new connections to the camera for each user?

Second question: what network IP camera uses the least amount of bandwidth that any of you have used before but with good quality. The stores need to be able to enter sales into the system via the internet so the connections are not just for the cameras.

Any info is much appreciated. Thanks.

[jameswilson]

zm, will do as you need but you will have bandwidth issues. ITs no so much which vameras give best quality at lowest bandwidth, that is like whats the faster car with the best mpg, it depends on so much.
YOu want mpeg based transmission but this has its own issues. If you want all stores to view all cams its not gonna be easy. If you only want each store to be able to view their own cams than that is easier. Probably a full spec of what you want to and the sizae of the links involved and how much youd like to use purly for video?

[zoneminder]

ZM will pull the feed from the cam, and then the viewers will connect to a relayed feed from the ZM box. You can limit users to certain sets of cameras and permisssions etc.

There is no particular IP cam with lower bandwidth requirements. The bandwidth is a factor of the size of the image, colour depth, image quality, frame rate and feed format. So a 320x288 low quality JPEG at 1 frame per second will use a small fraction of the bandwidth of 640x480 high quality at 5 fps for instance.

[eracc]

Hi all, my company installed a Fedora Core 6 ZM server with four Axis IP cameras (207, 211) that the end-user required to run at 640x480/5fps. The cameras are on their own subnet off a Linksys SRW208P switch connected to a second gigabit NIC in the server. The primary gigabit NIC is not connected to the customer's LAN nor WAN (yet) because their corporate IT denied our request to attach the camera system to the LAN. Corporate IT is saying viewing the cameras remotely will take up too much of the T1 bandwidth at the site. Of course this means the people at the site have to use the server monitor and Firefox on the server to actually view the cameras which is not really how ZM is intended to be used.

I need to find out roughly how much bandwidth would be used if the cameras were viewed in montage mode and in cycle mode. The regional manager for this location really wants to be able to view this site remotely and needs to convince his corporate IT guys that it will be ok. Is there any place where this has been determined and reported that I can use to make a report the regional manager can use? If not can anyone here with a similar setup do some bandwidth testing on the LAN side with ZM? Your setup does not have to be IP cameras of course, just 4 cameras using 640x480/5fps with the ZM server connected to a LAN. Since we have been denied that connection to their LAN we cannot do the testing on this system.

[zoneminder]

Calculating bandwidth is relatively straightforward. This FAQ item gives links to a couple of calculators. Obviously cycle mode can be considered as one stream more or less while montage will be all four. I very much doubt if remote viewing will swallow too much of a T1 though. If it's just people 'viewing' the cams rather than ZM accessing them, that you are worried about then you can limit users bandwidth and refresh rates etc to limit the amount of bandwidth used.