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I am building a camera security system for my office however we do not want to keep the DVR on site.

We looked at NVR (network video recorders) and they are too expensive. I thought of an alternative to this. I do not know how much feasible it is but would surely like some inputs here.

Here are my thoughts :

  1. Buy a regular IP camera
  2. Buy a server or an AWS instance and write a program to download the streaming feed continuously to the server.

Now I have some questions about the practicality of this solution and the technicalities involved with building such a system :

  1. What format do most IP cameras stream feeds in ? What frame rates are they transferred at ?
  2. If i were to write a program that could read this feed and download it and store it on a server, will I get the same quality as a live feed ?
  3. Will I need to again encode the data realtime to some other format (like flv.) before i store it ?
  4. Can you suggest a best possible architecture for this ? I was thinking an amazon instance and s3 for storage of video feeds.

There are some sites which already do this (like http://www.mangocam.com/)

Thanks and I hope this question meets the SO guidelines since this might be a gray area between programming and non-programming related. If not, I'll move it to some other stackexchange site (suggestions please)

YD8877
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    Is this a programming question? – Roman R. Sep 21 '12 at 07:43
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    why not? he wants information about a technology to implement a software, sounds programming to me – ruhalde May 03 '13 at 03:52
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    Because this is not a programming question - too broad and not constructive. Instead however, it attracts as a magnet references to complete software packages, esp. those with a smell of ads and lack of real use experience (as of now 4 low quality non-programming answers and one more or less programming answer isolated to specific hardware vendor). – Roman R. May 08 '13 at 13:51
  • @yashdesai I also have similar requirement i.e (Recording video feed from an IP camera over a network and upload to AWS server) for my application which is built with PHP platform. Can you advice for the same, about how you proceeded ? – kamal pal Dec 20 '16 at 16:39
  • @kamalpal do you implemented any solution using AWS. if so please can you advice. how can i upload video to AWS and distribute using AWS cloudfront. – CharanRoot Sep 28 '17 at 14:05
  • @Jonnysai you may upload your videos to S3, there are plenty of tuts for this .. just google it. [see this link](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigrateS3ToCloudFront.html), it explains the distribution of s3 content using CloudFront. – kamal pal Sep 29 '17 at 05:27
  • @kamalpal I have live video from ip camera so how can send live video to AWS S3. I think S3 will be useful if you have already recorded video but my use case is live video. – CharanRoot Sep 29 '17 at 15:05
  • @kamalpal Did you get anwser? – Maneesh Rao Nov 02 '20 at 09:09

4 Answers4

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I haven't used it yet but I would take a look at http://www.zoneminder.com/ The documentation explains you can install it on a modest machine with linux and use IP cameras for remote recording.

Andrew

apuschak
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about 3 years ago i needed cctv. I found zoneminder, tried to edit it to my liking, but found i was fixing it more than editing it.

Not to mention mp4 recording feature isn't actually part of the master branch (which is kind of lol, since its a cctv program and its already been about 3 years or more since it was suggested). Its literally just adapting the ffmpeg command lol.

So i found the solution!

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

I present to you Shinobi! Shinobi : The Open Source CCTV Platform

enter image description here

moeiscool
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3

Motion is an alternative to Zoneminder. It has a steeper setup curve as everything is configured via config files.However, the config files are nicely commented and it's easier than it sounds. It's very reliable once running as well.

To add a Foscam camera (mentioned above) use the following syntax to stream the video from the camera.

netcam_url http://<IPADDRESS>/videostream.cgi?user=admin?pwd=

Where the user is admin with a blank password (the default for Foscam cameras).

For really high uptime/reliablity consider using a monitoring tool such as Monit. This works well with Motion.

fergycool
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Why don't you consider www.cameraftp.com? it supports image upload and online viewer

Sean
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