ZoneMinder

[Snattlerake]

I sincerely hope Zoneminder is a much more stable platform than the Exacqvision and Milestone platforms I'm used to. Being Ubuntu based I'm sure it is more likely to be than Microslob.

I started out with sequential camera MUX's and VCR's with analog cameras. I have installed multimillion dollar CCTV systems running both analog and network for 25 years. I have run analog PTZ cameras over fiber optics into a fiber MUX then into proprietary code translators. (which didn't go well - long story) I have used about every DVR and NVR platform there is from Ma-N-Pa 4 channel to enterprise systems world wide. All that being said I much prefer the old analog systems of transmission compared to network. If an analog system goes down there is a physical reason for that to happen not because some magnetic pixie dust got it's shorts in a wad because of some automatic update Microslob thought we needed to fix machines in Zimbabwe. Yeah it actually happened.

We installed Exacqvision in a bunch of facilities and just when they needed the recorded video, guess what happened. Tech support was great but had no clue. It just quit working for some reason. All it took to get it started again was a reboot. The damn thing just stopped recording. There was no outside access to the NVR. They were all on their own private network not associated with the facilities main network. in any way. I do like megapixel and HD cameras and I feel they are kind of still in their infancy because the technology today is almost obsolete by next week. They are still inventing compression protocols and really have not decided upon a standard as of yet.

Give me the cameras of today with the robustness of yesterday.

 

[Snattlerake]

LOL, My house would look like a science experiment to you then. I actually had one person afraid to come in where I lived in lawton as he had a pacemaker.

Did it look like this? I think I've been there.

Actually this is kinda mild compared to some I've been in.

 

[dennishoddy]

Did it look like this? I think I've been there.

Actually this is kinda mild compared to some I've been in.

Oh that's real mild. I've been some places where that would be called a neat installation.

 

[Tanis143]

Did it look like this? I think I've been there.

Actually this is kinda mild compared to some I've been in.

I both love and hate to see this at customer's houses. Its almost always for slow speeds and its almost always something on their equipment. They never seem to see the need to test right off the modem.

Went to one guys house for a video issue (bad dvr, hard drive went kaput) and his server/av room was a literal wet dream. Every cable labeled, all of them in wire management harnesses. Had three of his cable boxes in there and they still had enough slack I could pull them from the rack with ease. If every job was like that one my days would be cake walks.

 

[NightShade]

Not quite that much but the cable room wasn't far off from that. It was in the floor above me. I know I posted it at one point a few years ago on here. When I left I think it was up to about 56 channels, each one had a directv receiver or a digital OTA receiver with a modulator and then one was a computer where I plumbed in Titantv.com page that would auto scroll with all the channels setup.

The basement had a lot more as I inherited and in house HPNA network that was used to provide internet to those who paid extra. At one point in time we had 4 internet connections coming in, one cable, two DSL and one fixed wireless ran through the router and then some HPNA switches dropped over to 66 blocks and ran up to the floors where more 66 blocks were located. Lets just say that 50 year old phone lines have noise on them so it kinda sucked dealing with. Kept trying to talk them into running gigabit switches with cat 5 to each floor and then just limit each port to 1Mbps on the floors so that no one could pull more than that. Then drop a cat 5 to an apartment and use the same system of just hooking the cable up but instead doing it in the closet on each floor instead of the basement with all the crappy wiring. They had an old laundry chute that was a perfect run form the basement to each floor but didn't want to do it. Last I saw the place was all shut down anyway.

My desk when I was down there though had 2 monitors on it, one was a gateway destination monitor, the great big huge thing that was supposed to replace a tv. Also had 5 computers on it, four hooked to one monitor with a KVM and one just running the destination. Add to that my desktop and my wife's computer in the living room and all the stuff to connect it all and the computer I used as a media player for my tv in there. I had a DSL line as well as a line into the buildings network so I could check on it from time to time ran into two separate routers one that handed out DHCP and the other that didn't so I would set a static IP on the computer I wanted to use to access the in building network. But a lot more hardware running then than I do now even though now I have a lot more things going on. Technically I have 4 computers running right now, one is my router Dual L5630's, one is my server Dual E5640's, my desktop Ryzen 1600, and the miner that is 3 GPU's with a PentiumG 4560 and some ram. The server has 7 Jails along with a virtual machine with Docker running in it.

 

[NightShade]

Being Ubuntu based I'm sure it is more likely to be than Microslob

Well it's not acutally Ubuntu based but will run on pretty much any Unix compatible system. It's a little more utilitarian but it was able to find the camera and configure itself for the most part. A couple changes to the settings and it was up and running with the Reolink Camera.

Getting out of Microsoft land and using regular old Cat5 is probalby the only way to go now. H264 or X264 compression for the camera's is also really good as a standard. In fact Zoneminder can just pass that through to the MP4 it saves when there is an event which is going to work out nicely as I am actually going to pipe them into Plex.

 

[Snattlerake]

Most commercial network cameras have their own boot disk program for setting parameters on the camera and the IP address is usually a fixed boot IP like 192.168.1.500 so you can search for it upon boot or reset with a manual button. These built in programs are usually not reachable by the NVR program and you have to use their little utility. Once in, you can then either use DHCP or assign static. Sometimes we had to telnet but that is going bye bye.

 

[MacFromOK]

I actually had one person afraid to come in where I lived in lawton as he had a pacemaker.

Probably afraid you'd strip him for parts...