On Tuesday, May 17, 2011 09:33:47 AM Lanny Marcus wrote:
> ZoneMinder seems to be a much more active project.

> I would appreciate Feedback, from anyone who has used either or both
> of these programs. Pros and Cons?

> The idea is to have at least two (2) cameras. One for Arrivals and One
> for Departures.

We're using ZoneMinder here for eight cameras currently.  It's on CentOS 5, and 
the cameras are network cameras.  The CPU load is pretty high with eight 
cameras at frame rates above 5fps, since much of the work is transcoding the 
video from the camera (the particular cams we have aren't MPEG4; they're frame 
at a time JPEG, and that's the worst-case scenario from a transcoding point of 
view, as well as from a network traffic point of view).  We settled on 1 fps, 
and the load is very manageable with modern hardware (dual core 2.2GHz or 
higher).

Building ZoneMinder from source is not the easiest thing I've ever done, nor is 
it the hardest, but it needs some particular versions of particular libraries 
(ffmpeg for one) or it breaks pretty badly.  It will also require either 
setting SELinux to permissive or off, or writing SELinux policy to allow the 
ZoneMinder processes access to the various things they need access to (sockets, 
network ports, etc).

However, there are better solutions available commercially that are 'install it 
and it runs' solutions, and as much as I like and use open source things, for 
this application it might be better to get an inexpensive commercial solution, 
like one from SuperCircuits or similar vendor who does this kind of thing 
professionally.  Some of those commercial solutions are Linux-based, and some 
might even be ZoneMinder-based, but you'll get commercial support and that 
might make the difference between evidence gained from the cameras being 
accepted or not (depending upon whether you want video from these cameras to be 
recorded and available to law enforcement).

Our cameras aren't 'security' cameras in that sense, and so it made sense to 
roll our own for our application.
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