Comments for ZoneMinder
Re: Wow!
All right. I couldn't find any comments because mine is the first? Hard to believe! :-)
Wow!
(Weird site. I can add a comment, but I can't find other people's comments on ZoneMinder.)
Well, free software doesn't get any better than this. (OK OK---the Gnu C Compiler is still king by far, particularly when compared to that quick hack of a kernel, what is it called? Nullix?) I installed ZoneMinder on Ubuntu 7.10 server using apt-get on a US$300 pc. It simply ran. To be fair, I googled "zoneminder install" and read someone's advice to add user www-data to group video, and as an extra precaution I gave /dev/video0 mode 666. I have no idea how hard it would have been to debug any problem arising from lack of permissions.
I don't know what professional video surveillance system should look like, and by now it's too late to have an unbiased opinion, because ZoneMinder looks quite complete even for professional installations. I have used it for two days and with a single camera, on which I set up two zones. It works amazingly well. I plan on adding more cameras.
The zones make it possible to exclude vegetation, which could trigger false alarms when windy. I still get false alarms with fast moving clouds, but they are fairly infrequent, and it doesn't matter since I only use them for triggering recording events (using MODECT mode). So far I don't think it's missed any events, even using the lightweight motion detection algorithm.
The presentation of events and other stored or real-time information is well thought. The configurability is enormously simplified by the web interface, which is clear and comprehensive (and if you don't understand something you don't need to touch it---the defaults so far seem well guessed).
Of course two days is not enough to really know how well it works. But so far so good, and I'll be surprised if I run into major problems in the future. Good job.
ZoneMinder is a great piece of software. It you want to get a quick start, I've created a VMware appliance that is available here: linuxtracker.org/index... . It's based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server with the bare minimum to get ZoneMinder to work (LAMP+ZoneMinder req's).