Grant <emailgrant <at> gmail.com> writes:
> I've been using motion along with USB cameras for a while. I need to > expand my monitoring capacity and I'm wondering if I should consider > changing software or hardware. motion seems fairly dead but is > stable. I'm reading conflicting info about the current status of > zoneminder. Is anyone using IP cams? Hello Grant, Some years ago, the slickest webserver plus zoneminder setup was this http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/cherokee/users/2450 cherokee + zoneminder + php Another solution is to get some pci cards that take a coax input from a coax cable (RG/59 or RG6 for distance) directly into the PC. There you can convert the streaming video into h.264 and move it around the ethernet. Encoder (coax to h.264) pci cards use to abound such as Qsee, Avermedia etc etc. You can also get embedded boards from TI that include the DaVinci package which take in coax and convert it to H.264. I use to get the best information about the key chips reading the linux kernel driver documentation found in the old drivers. Many of the drivers (most?) have been unified and the in-driver documents therein will be mostly useless, so old 2.4 and 2.6 drivers for specific chipsets is the best source, if you really want to dig into video over IP. Most currently manufactured IP cams go to great links to make their hardware a "black box" on what they are doing to output the H.264. [2] Furthermore, you have to delve in the "container" versus the packets when you find incompatibilities. Many of the advanced ethernet sniffing software packages have h.264 filters build in [1]. It's all H.264, just a lot of software gymnastics to frustrate folks from rolling their own video solution. If I were to get serious about video/IP, I'd go with VP8 (google's standard) and find a codec (opensource) that could be put on a micro processor board; pandaboard? [3]. Googling around and I'm sure you can find something. [4] usb video sucks, once you try to "scale up" for any sort of serious video surveillance system; imho. hth, James [1] http://www.wireshark.org/docs/dfref/h/h264.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8 [3] https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/Middleware/ Multimedia/Specs/1105/OptimizeVp8Decoding [4] http://www.webmproject.org/tools/
