Zoneminder (or other home-surveillance-solution) advice wanted?

Hardware Server
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1

Hi all,

a few questions to all ZoneMinder users.
I’m running openhab2 on a RaspberryPi3 with ssd-harddisk and I want to use zoneminder as surveillance solution integrated in openHAB2.
(capture, analysis, recording and monitoring up to 4-5 security cameras)
I don’t have any experience with zoneminder or any other home-surveillance-solution.

I would like to know if it’s possible to run zoneminder on the same RaspberryPi3?
Or should I buy a second RaspberryPi3 exlusively for zoneminder?
Or should I use another hardware/software?
How does your setup looks like?

2

Seen from a technical perspective there shouldn’t be any problems. I don’t know if the Raspberry can handle the load, but give it a try :slight_smile:

3

There is likely not going to be enough ram on the pi too adequately run zoneminder more than two or three cameras.

I’m pretty sure at a minimum you would want to run it in its own Pi , but you will still be very limited.

4

Just checked my virtual machine running ZM. It is conbsuming 2 GB, so is guess @rlkoshak has a good point :slight_smile:

5

I bought an ODROID XU4 to install zoneminder on. I haven’t done it yet but will report once I have some experience with it.

6

Thanks to everybody!

I am very interested to hear about your experiences.

I have not expected that even a separate RPi might be not enough.
I’ve searched the web for more information now and I’m thinking about wether it would be better to use a proper nvr-recorder or a nas-system.
But would it be possible to integrate such a system into openhab2?

Btw: Searching for nvr I found this information about NVR’s Bitrate interesting. I think that might be a problem as well, if I would be using a rpi and 4 or 5 full-hd-cams. As you say: “but you will still be very limited”.

7

Right, according to my research the Pi3 just doesn’t have the specs to really handle multiple video streams, especially HD. This likely won’t change even with different software. I went with the ODROID because it’s got better specs and seemed like a lot of power for the price.

8

I wanted ZM to run five IP cameras each with motion detection and fairly high resolution. Lots of dire warnings on internet forums about how greedy zoneminder is, so bought a cheap i5 PC to use as a server. I needn’t have bothered - usually around 15% utilisation.

9

An i5 server is so much more powerful as to be capable of orders of magnitude more than a Pi. They really are not all that comparable. And like I said, the big issue is ram, not cpu. ZM doesn’t really hot the CPU hard but it is very memory hungry.

I have only one stream right now and it uses more ram than is available on a pi 3.

10

I am reassured I did not waste my money, then!