[PLUG] Open Source - Home Security Cameras

Chuck Hast wchast at gmail.com
Mon Apr 7 04:15:34 UTC 2014


No problem. Back when I lived in Tampa, FL,  we had a issue with the
offspring of a neighbor using the mailboxes as drops for drugs. I put
up a camera but did not have a way to capture the video, I started to
look for a open source solution, and found ZM. That was about 12 yrs
ago, I have been using it ever since. I have seen it used for all kinds
of novel things, one guy (and his neighbors) over in the UK had a issue
with a person driving at excessive speed through the area, all of them
had young children, but they could not get the police to do anything
about it, as I recall he used ZM to not only ID the car but to obtain a
reasonable estimate of speed on the vehicle, and I believe they were
able to obtain relief with the aid of the video captures. I also had a
neighbor have a break in, one of my cameras captured the vehicle
entering and leaving the property, the sheriff  asked for more video
and in the end I gave them the last 6 months of video capture, I do
not know if they found the guy, but we were able to see that he was
driving a Jeep Cherokee and he had a large tat on the left arm. He
was also rather obese. ZM captures each frame as a JPG, law
enforcement really likes that format.

Yes ZoneMinder is fun to play around with, or get serious and cap-
ture some serious video.



On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 6:12 PM, Michael Ewan <mhewan1 at comcast.net> wrote:

> On 04/06/14 09:00, Chuck Hast wrote:
> > I am new to the list, have been living here in Kalama WA
> > now for two years, I have been using ZoneMinder for over
> > 10 years. I use it here in the glass plant, and also I have
> > a server (not installed) which I brought from my home in
> > Tampa when we moved here.
> >
> > I use all IP cameras on it and it works great. When I lived
> > in Tampa one of my amateur radio friends who is a com-
> > mericial security systems guy told me that ZoneMinder
> > had things that only very expensive DVR products have,
> > and I have used it to do all sort of detection things.
> >
> > Take a look at it:
> > www.zoneminder.com
> >
> > It is VERY flexible and of course ALL open source. There
> > is a large community. I am running it on a very BIG box
> > her (8 xeon 24G memory server because I had it and I
> > expect to expand the thing) but you can run it on most
> > anything that you can get your hands on in this day and
> > age. It likes a lot of memory and a 500G Hd will keep 8
> > cameras with 6 months of history easy.
> >
> > I run all IP cameras though it can do both IP and analogue
> > cams. I usually set the cameras up on a 1gb island lan
> > so i am not routing video over a shared resource, but if
> > you are only sending a few images every once and a while
> > you can try your hand at sharing your lan. the only part
> > that needs to be a gb link is between the DVR and the
> > switch, most cameras are 100mb, Make sure that the
> > switch has enough space so it does not block if you get
> > several cameras being hit at the same time.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Tyrell Jentink <tyrell at jentink.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> I won't speak to the subject of hardware or recording software, because
> I
> >> have no experience with either... But for cloud storage, just about
> >> anything can store encrypted files. You can encrypt the video archives
> and
> >> sync them to Dropbox, and there ain't no one watching them without your
> >> decryption key.
> >>
> >> And if you set it to auto delete at a sane interval, you should be able
> to
> >> keep the total storage size on the cloud pretty reasonable (and in turn,
> >> cheap) as well.
> >>
> >> I would personally be tempted to NOT have a streaming server with
> >> associated holes in my firewall, and instead rely souly on whatever
> cloud
> >> service I ended up using to access the recordings. That way, IF you
> trust
> >> the encryption on the files, the only security risk is equivalent to
> basic
> >> web browsing.
> >>
> >> NEW QUESTION:
> >>
> >> Home security cameras and Linux:
> >>
> >> I often wonder about networked home security cameras with an ability to
> >> stream to internet or cloud storage in to preserve evidence out of reach
> >> of the miscreants harming one's property.
> >>
> >> The advantage of open source (in that it is inspectable by many
> >> disinterested persons) is that users can be more confident that there
> >> are either no software backdoors built in and possibly that if any
> >> hardware backdoors are discovered, that there maybe software patches
> >> which available to them.
> >>
> >> Otherwise you might get THIS:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.latinospost.com/articles/25613/20130815/video-baby-monitor-hacked-texas-foreign-man-who-called-toddler.htm
> >>> So - is anyone playing around with home security using remote storage
> of
> >>> surveillance video which is secure from unauthorized access?
> >>> (Including where a lawful private citizen wishes to resist access by
> the
> >>> data hosting company, or by lower levels of government?)
> >>>
> >>> - G
> >>>
> >>>
>
> Thanks for the great information and welcome to the community. Although
> I do not have a current need for this kind of security is nice to know
> that it exists in open source.
>
>
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-- 

Chuck Hast  -- KP4DJT --
Glass, five thousand years of history and getting better.
The only container material that the USDA gives blanket approval on.



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