Peter Wood wrote:
Subject: [CentOS] Motion Detecting Camera From: Leslie S Satenstein lsatenstein@yahoo.com Date: Sat, February 01, 2014 7:27 am To: "centos@centos.org" centos@centos.org
mark wrote
With the continuing annoyance from motion, my manager's asked me to go looking again for a video surveillance appliance: basically, a motion-detecting DVR and cameras. The big thing, of course, is a) price (this is a US federal gov't agency, and being civilian, money is *tight*, don't give me the libertarian/GOP line about how freely we spend, thankyouverymuch), b) it has to be on the network, and c) we need to be able to d/l to a server, and rm after we do that... and we want to script or cron job that.
I was in Costco (USA warehouse store) and saw a Philips LED display, Camera, Recorder, that was motorized. The camera followed the movement across the front of it, and could snapshot to a memory chip. It was under $80.00 for the ensemble. The floor model worked well.
If you do not require realtime recording to a hard disk, then this item may be a reasonable cost solution.
We control 20+ cameras with a single CentoOS server running zoneminder: http://www.zoneminder.com/
Just buy cheap cameras that have one of the interfaces zoneminder supports. We use continuos sftp upload (1fps, no sound). Motion
detection is way
more superior in zoneminder then any built-in solution on the camera
itself, so
motion detection on the cameras is disabled. To get more fps and sound you may have to use some other interface but it may require more computing power.
a) Please don't top post. b) Ok, I guess that either i) I was utterly incomprehensible as to my requirements, or ii) no one has any opinions/experience with what I asked for.
I'm leaning towards the latter, but I'll try again: 1) We run, and have been running for *years*, inexpensive USB cameras plugged into rackmount servers running the motion package on CentOS. Every few subreleases, some problem crops up in what I *think* is the video driver that comes with CentOS (gspca), and I spend a lot of time resolving the problems. 2) My manager says he "wants to be out of the business" of this, and wants me to look into "surveillance appliance" packages - that is, a DVR w/ say, four cameras. They're all in "computer labs", where the lights are on 24x7, so no weather or low-light worries. USB or BNC cables are fine, don't need wireless or IP cameras. 3) They *DO* have to record real-time. 4) We *do* need to be able to d/l the videos to a server for storage, and that needs to happen via a cron job, at least, if not by a process watching it.[1] 5) Budget is a real consideration (unless you, personally, are willing to buy whatever would meet the above requirements and donate several of the packages to the US gov't). 6) We need several, for several "computer labs"[2] < $500 per package is good. Don't need "Professional Grade" quality, just something that will sit there and work for years with little in the way of maintenance. We can easily put it behind a firewall, to protect it against anyone, including the regular pen testers....
1. Having the firmware on the DVR send out an email that can both got to the appropriate mailing list and trigger a d/l would work. 2. They're not server room, server rooms, under current US gov't rules, are much more of a Big Deal, with a lot more rules and $$$ecurity, even if it's a rack in a closet).
mark