[XCSSA] Motion activated Security Cam/CCTV Monitoring in Linux

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

On Thursday 09 July 2009 11:02:16 am X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio 
wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:17 PM, X-otic Computer Systems of San
>
> Antonio<xcssa at xcssa.org> wrote:
> > Others doing, or thinking about doing this stuff?  Do share. :)
>
> Tweeks, I installed ZoneMinder on my server last night and connected
> to my wired Axis cam. It may be the browser or the Axis cam, but once
> I closed the browser the camera image was still active effectively
> using all of my outbound network bandwidth. Only until I stopped the
> 'zm' daemon did it finally stop. Any ideas on how to fix this?

I'm not exactly clear on your setup Jeremy... But ZM uses motion program under 
the hood.. which is always "connected" to the video device, watching it 
waiting for "motion events" and setting off alarms, alerts and recording when 
needed.  If your camera is hooked directly to the ZM server.. then it should 
not be consuming any bandwidth... However, if you have your Axis camera at 
home, and server on the Net pulling a solid stream from it.. then yeah man.. 
you're going to be filling your uplink out of your house continuously, 24x7.. 
and Time Warning or AT&T will probably shut you down (or start capping 
you ;).  

I'm not a ZM guru yet.. so ask around, but I think that if your camera 
supports PTZ controls (and I thin Axis do), then you can remotely put your 
camera to sleep, and wake it up again from the ZM interface. Although I don't 
think that you can do motion alerts and events with it in that state.

So figure out what you're really wanting to do with it.. and then design the 
system more appropriately. ;)

Wow.. we seem to have stumbled across quite the hot topic!  Sounds like we're 
going to need to have a presentation on this (any volunteers, please step 
up.:)  And of course.. as usual.. any time we cover a topic like this.. it 
seems like it's not 2-4 months later LInux Journal does a piece on it.  I 
swear they must lurk on our list.. or at least it seems that way. :)

Tweeks