Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 RTSP cameras - monitor only

[angeloavv]

Hello everyone, I'm trying to build a surveillance system based on ZoneMinder and RTSP cameras that will be integrated in a domotic environment.

Basically, what I'm trying to achieve is this:
- Each user can own a set of cameras (max 8 cameras), each camera streams in RTSP to zoneminder local server
- The zoneminder application is configured to monitor the stream of each camera only, zm will not save the stream and won't perform motion detection, only monitoring
- The zoneminder local server connects itself to a remote server through reverse tunneling and streams each camera to the remote zoneminder server
- The domotic application (Android and iOS) access to the remote server to serve the stream to the end user

I successfully created the whole project using a single camera and two Intel Core i3 machines located in different areas for testing purposes.
Now I need to do load tests using the maximum amount of available cameras and using the cheapest local server hardware that can be installed over the client.

Doing some research, I read that some people successfully created a zoneminder setup on a Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 using something like 3 or 4 cameras. Since those people were using zoneminder for recording purposes, they said they were limited by disk performance.

I was wondering if anyone has already created a setup with something like 8 cameras connected over RTSP. I need to understand if the Raspberry Pi 4 can handle the loads of 8 cameras or it's better to buy better hardware like Intel Atom based NUCs. I wanted to hear your opinion before wasting money on hardware that won't be enough to handle the whole project.

Thank you.

[iconnor]

You might be able to do it with a pi4, as it has more ram.

[burger]

Personally I'd lean towards the x86 architecture, but if you want to test it out, buy one RPI 4 with at least 4GB preferably 8GB ram, and see how it turns out.

You could probably do it at a low res / fps. You have to adjust gpu_mem (https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Single_Board_Computers)