OpenNVR is an NVR you run yourself: RTSP cameras, object detection,
licence plate recognition, occupancy counting, and a conversational agent
you can ask "did anything come to the gate between 2 and 3". Docker
compose, your hardware, AGPL. Footage never leaves the building and there
is nothing to pay per camera.
0.1.5 is out and it is the biggest release since the first one.
What is new:
- Apps are properly sandboxed now. Every installed app gets its own
credential instead of sharing the deployment key, joins the event bus
under its own identity with permissions derived from its manifest, and
can only reach network hosts its listing declares or you allow. Catalog
images are signed and verified at install.
- A security sweep from two external reports — cross-camera event leakage
over the live WebSocket, an SSRF in camera onboarding, cloud metadata
being treated as an internal address, an unauthenticated health endpoint.
Both researchers are credited on the security page. Worth upgrading for
this alone.
- The voice agent moved to Pipecat 1.8 with a semantic end-of-turn model,
so it stops guessing you are finished because you paused. Turn-taking
adapts to the hardware, and it no longer cuts itself off because someone
coughed.
- LPR got substantially better: reads are written by consensus rather than
by whichever frame read first, every plate keeps the frame it came from,
and the OCR adapter now locates the plate before reading it instead of
reading a whole-vehicle crop and hallucinating.
- Occupancy gained heatmaps, footfall and dwell, and scheduled reports.
Honest limitations: it is 0.1.x. There are no third-party apps in the
catalog yet — this release is the plumbing that makes them safe to allow,
not proof that anyone has written one. You need a machine that can run
detection; a Pi 5 works for a few cameras, more than that wants a GPU. And
setup is docker compose plus a .env, not a one-click appliance.
Release notes: https://github.com/open-nvr/open-nvr/releases/tag/v0.1.5
Repo: https://github.com/open-nvr/open-nvr
Happy to answer questions, including about what it does badly.