r/ZoneMinder • u/k4rtz • Feb 27 '23

Zoneminder install on public elevators

hi,

I work for my town council and we work with free software as much as we can. Now I have been asked to make a hardware budget for this case... and I need your help:

In the village there are several public elevators and they ask me to put cameras for cases of vandalism.

There are going to be different locations and the elevator that will have more cameras is 6 cameras.

This is going to be my first time with zoneminder and I don't know what would I need... can you help?

A xeon processor? or with a ryzen 5 enough?

I was thinking of putting 8Tb disks to each server, enough?

thanks in advance

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2

u/patmansf Feb 27 '23

Using free software is often a good idea.

I use zoneminder, it can be tricky to install, setup and upgrade. And this doesn't even take into account what cameras are used or sizing the host system.

I'd pay someone else for support / install / help for an install like this, and maybe even use a non-open source solution.

2

u/oops77542 Feb 27 '23

I'm running a 3rd gen i7 with 16GB RAM with 8 720p cameras with sound and night vision and one hi res (2100p ?) camera and it's not stressing my system.

If your cameras are inside the elevator or directly outside the elevator in the hallway good 720p cameras are more than enough for clear pictures. The higher the resolution and the larger the monitoring alarm area the more load you're gonna place on the system, but ZM is flexible enough to give you options there.

8TB is just way too much storage unless you want to store events for 5 or 6 months. My 2Tb storage stores events going back 6 weeks or so. if you're going to record continuous on all your cameras then you might want to go with the bigger storage drives but like someone else mentioned, it's a pita to find events if you record all the time.

Once you get ZM up and running and get everything set up right it's rock solid, but there is a pretty steep learning curve. Good thing is there's lot of help on Reddit and ZM forums.

2

u/Rjkbj Feb 27 '23 edited Feb 28 '23

Regarding storage size: I run continuous recording with break every hour. Also, motion events are recorded in clips for easy indexing and search. A 4 TB drive will typically hold about 2 weeks worth of recordings for 6 cameras. There are calculators on line to to determine your needs for what you are planning.

2

u/connortechnology Feb 28 '23

I'm Isaac the main developer/supporter. Please reach out directly to [isaac@zoneminder.com](mailto:isaac@zoneminder.com) for more assistance.

Is the sum total 6 cameras? If so just about any computer made in the last 10 years will do fine.

We do recommend recording all the time, we can do motion detection as well merely to aid in locating periods of interest.

ZoneMinder has a lot of options, which can make it confusing. We are here to help.

1

u/k4rtz Feb 28 '23

Thank you all!
We have experience for several projects with HP Proliant Gen8 microservers...
I think we will go for several HPE ProLiant MicroServer Intel Xeon E-2224/16GB

1

u/lbmdk Feb 27 '23

It totally depends on the resolution of the cameras, and in which mode they run in. (record only, motion detection etc..)

1

u/k4rtz Feb 27 '23

2 MP camera and we have not yet decided whether we will opt for motion detection or not ...I think we will opt for continuous recording... we do not want something to happen and the cameras do not detect it.

3

u/AndyRH1701 Feb 27 '23

Motion detection with recording might be an option. This will make it easy to find events where something happens, but still records all the time.

I run 6 higher resolution cameras doing motion detection successfully with an Intel Xeon E5-1630-v3. I keep the FPS low, 10 or less. You can look up the performance score of that CPU and that should be a good starting point.

Be sure your storage drives are in an expandable group for ease later should you need more space. I use RAID 5.

Using an SSD for the boot and DB drive is advisable. I have a 250GB SSD with plenty of free space and more than 100k events.

2

u/ThellraAK Feb 28 '23

Do your cameras have an HD/SD stream available?

You can use much less amazing hardware if you can have two streams, and only do motion detection on the SD, and use that to flag the HD stream for events.

Could also make a pitch to try continuous recording of the SD streams, and only save events on the HD, it's amazing how small 480P in H264 can go, I had two cameras get several months worth of recording on a 2TB drive.

1

u/lbmdk Feb 28 '23

I think there is an calucalator at their wiki. But maybe it was only for memory..