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We've just completed our second major ZoneMinder installation. It provides comprehensive security and campus productivity coverage for our local school . 
The timeline view is particularly good for getting a quick overview of where movement is happening. Each spike is a score of the amount of movement in each recorded frame. You can easily see clusters of movement, and periods when nothing is happening. You can click to zoom in to finer timeslots, allowing easy location of particular events, much easier than scanning through tapes. We installed and configured a dedicated server, running Ubuntu server edition. We find that a reasonably powerful processor is required for ZM, along with good cooling and plenty of disk. The system works resonably hard to stream all the cameras to disk, as well as do all the analysis and frame processing in real time. Disk usage can be as much as 30Gb a day, depending on resolution, frame rate, and number of cameras. Disk space auto recycles when the disk is full, providing a rolling five day historical window. The trickiest part of setup is configuring the system to work with the capture card. We use only Linux recommended product, but it's still not simple install and use. We continue to wish that manufacturers would put more effort into testing their hardware on Linux platforms. It actually helps uncover bugs in hardware that are often masked by Windows. Only consumer pressure and preference will influence them effectively, make sure you ask your supplier about Linux support when evaluating product. ZoneMinder uses Perl, php and MySQL, so utilises standard platform components for reliable, predictable operation. This system has five cameras installed, and can take up to sixteen local cameras, and additional IP or network cameras. We expect this server will be able to carry approximately twenty cameras in total. We will be doing some follow up fine tuning to improve overall image clarity. Things like cleaning windows, fitting reflected light hoods, adjusting colour and whiteout balance, camera focus, angle and zoom. We're very pleased with the outcome of the system. It has a strong, reliable feel, and is easy to use. Speed and responsiveness is good, remote access is easy. Viewing the montage (all cameras at once) gives a good feel for what is going on around the school, especially at busy times, or when things are meant to be quiet. It allows management to quickly focus on areas needing attention, and to be assured when locations are vacant. It also allows easy coroboration of conflicting versions of events, just like the video referee at the rugby. The total cost of the installation was $5,000. This included installation, setup, cabling, high resolution cameras, powerful rack mount server, capture card, configuration and tuning. The software is all open source of course, so has no up front or ongoing licence fees. We chose to make a donation to the Zone Minder team, since their efforts make this whole system possible, and we continue to contribute to the user community forums. Update 2011 We've found some customers need a more sophisticated user interface, better up time and more convieniant access to recordings than ZoneMinder can offer. For these sites,, we now install BlueCherry Surveillance. |
