Zoneminder is a pretty solid setup for IP security cameras, and the zmninja app is really nice too. I had tried it years ago but got back to it recently with some sketchy IP cameras. I just put them in their own VLAN, no Internet access, Zoneminder does motion detection and event recording, and so far I’m quite pleased with it.
+1 for Zoneminder, I ran one for years.
I’m all about Frigate now. It can use a GPU or Edge TPU to inference humans, cars & animals on modect events.
Frigate is next level. Didn’t even have to change the IP cams.
That’s kinda cool. I don’t have good GPUs on this server though, it’s an old R720.
Zoneminder is best for a low-power system. In the last year or so, it got proper passthrough support so it can record video straight off the camera with zero processing. You don’t get alarms or motion detection or live view, but you can record 24x7 using 2% of your CPU.
If you get a camera with built in detection like a Reolink I think you can trigger off the camera alarm. It is not easy though, takes some scripting. It is not great but better than nothing.
I set up a low res feed on Modect and use that to trigger recording the event on the second high res camera channel on Nodect, that keeps the CPU usage reasonable.
I’m a big fan of scrypted. I moved to that from Frigate. Not regrets, easier to setup and use.
While frigate is every bit as capable, I got tired of tinkering with it or it breaking with my install when I updated it.
No issues this far with scrypted.
As of right now, no. It’s relatively new as I understand. The feature to record only events is a planned addition. As of right now it records 24/7 and records events. I have 7 cameras currently set up, a 7 day set of recordings takes about 1.5TB. This includes many 1080P and 2K resolution cameras.
Again no I’ll intent towards frigate, I needed something more plug and play and LOVE the plug-in functionality of it as well. I’m also already using it for HomeKit integration so it was an easy transition to making it my frigate replacement.
Eh. Frigate+Shinobi on Docker has been the simplest solution I’ve found. ZoneMinder was always difficult. BlueIris was a resource hog.
Windows users will want to check out BlueIris
Otherwise, Synology has a great surveillance package, but you only get 2 cameras licenses with your NAS and more licenses are like $50 each
I love motion eye for being super simple. It doesn’t have many advanced features but is much less finicky than Zm/shinobi.
