The main arguments seem to be: Zoneminder is mature, reliable. With a Synology NAS as my primary CCTV capture device - it just works so well. An old Dell SFF Optiplex 990 running Ubuntu server 18.04.03 LTS,.
![Linux Linux](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125563305/996206486.jpg)
Blue Iris is effing amazing, although I don't think it's open source. Although technically marketed towards SMB and residential the software scales well in enterprise. I run 20 HD cams off a Xeon E-1225 and a single SATA disk and the software has never crashed or glitched. The Web interface is superb and you'll rarely ever have to touch the server. Does H265, has a mobile client that's excellent, direct to disk with no re-encoding.
Developer is aggressive about patches and pushing out new features. Personally I think it's too stupid cheap at $60.Personally I would totally ignore stuff like blueiris or ispy, because they only work on Windows.
In my mind all servers should be Linux unless there is no alternative.Personally I would ignore comments from myopic linux zealots pushing a religious agenda like this because anybody who can't afford $60 for a software license and a Windows OS license has likely failed at enough in the IT field to no be taken seriously.H264 / H265 encoding and decoding is pretty much an application or hardware assisted affair and has no bearing on the OS running it.
I’ve started using Shinobi. It’s a free (for home use) CCTV solution that is an alternative to ZoneMinder and Blue Iris. It runs on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.I initially tried running it on an ODroid XU4 without much success.
I’m now running it on an old Dell running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS alongside openHAB 2.2. So far I only have two cameras but it runs really well.There is no openHAB binding (yet), but I do have jpegs from the camera feeds displayed on my sitemap along with mjpeg feeds on HABpanel. It also supports an API which should work with the http binding ( though I haven’t tested it yet).I share this because, even without a binding, it integrates well with openHAB and I was looking for alternatives after frustration with ZoneMinder. I’d be curious to hear others’ experience with Shinobi, particularly with regards to openHAB integration. Thanks for sharing. I’ve been having challenges with ZoneMinder as well.
The Docker containers I find are out of date and it is not an easy program to install. This might be an adequate replacement (BI doesn’t run on Linux so it is out of consideration in my environment, I’m not anti-windows, I just don’t want to pay for a license just to run one service).I’ll have to give it a look. I don’t expect I’ll ever have more than three or four cameras so lack of mutiserver support isn’t a problem for me.However, while it has a pretty good API for controlling Shinobi, I’m not seeing a way for Shinobi to reach out and trigger OH or anything else when, for example, it detects motion or other OpenCV events.
I only looked for like 5 minutes so I may have missed it.But I’m as if not more interested in getting the motion events to OH than I am in using OH to trigger a camera to record. This was actually my first change to play with the API, and I’ve had the same success with GET! I’m really happy you guys both like it so far.I agree that it looks like Shinobi doesn’t currently have a way to share its motion events via its API, though I’m going to install the motion plugin and play around with it.It looks like there’s, though it doesn’t look like importing motion events is an option yet there either.
I’ll plan to keep an eye on their efforts, though I doubt I have the skills to duplicate it in a binding. I have build custom docker images for Shinobi CCTV based on Shinobi Pro. Thanks to MoeIsCool for his great work and inspiration. You will find it on Docker Hub.The Alpine images fails right now on Shinobi’s timestamp features because because Alpine’s ffmpeg package is missing the configuration “–enable-libfreetype”. Compiling ffmpeg from the sources did not the trick.That’s why I decided to add a Debian based docker image; Debian’s ffmpeg package does not miss any required configuration options.
API-access is working so Dome’s items should be able to access Shinobi’s monitors and groups.I’ll add some stuff for setting up the database on remote MariaDB or MySQL servers. Right now you’ll find a script and corresponding sql-files on GitHub.