On 09/15/2014 07:09 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote:
Hi All,
I have a customer whose with a long term project which
includes about 30 IP cameras. He wants to both view and
record. Anyone know or have a favorite Linux server
for such?
Many thanks,
-T
I highly recommend "motion":
http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome
I have it currently running with 18 webcams of VGA resolution. Motion
is reading the cameras at 5 fps, storing only frames with motion
including a timestamp and the motion region "boxed", and serving the
images at 1 fps to live viewers. All these settings are configurable
but those are suitable for my security purposes.
It works fine on an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor currently consuming
approx 175% CPU time (almost 2 cores) but the processor is running in
idle (800 MHz) clock speed mode due to the reduced priority I give to
the motion process. Theoretically this looks like it could scale to
more than 100 cameras with this same CPU running full clock speed.
Since only frames with motion are stored the disk activity is relatively
low most of the time. However, each image is about 50 kB and at 5 per
second that could be 250 kB/s per camera with continuous motion.
Extended to 100 cameras that would be 25 MB/s which is still not that bad.
The software runs 24x7 and despite the enormous amount of traffic it
processes it has been rock solid. Honestly I don't remember the last
time it gave me issues.
As for live view I use a separate system. I built a webpage for groups
of 6 cameras in a 3 wide by 2 high grid. That works out to 1920x960
which fits nicely on a 1080p widescreen monitor. Then I use a java
viewer (cambozola) to stream the video inside the browser. 3
screens/browser windows show all 18 cameras. Obviously this would need
to scale up with the number of cameras.
Jeff
