Doorbell Camera

[Maximo1970]

I'm thinking about adding a Doorbell camera to add to my current setup. But not sure which one to go with. Has anyone managed to get one setup and working with ZoneMinder, I know you can't have a two-way conversation and that's not important to me at this stage.

Like most of us on here, I don't fancy paying for cloud storage that is out of my control or have to pay a monthly subscription just to access my camera's.

[lightguy48]

Ditto! Also thought about doing the same too, but everything seems to be cloud based stuff...

[Magic919]

EZVIZ DB1 is what Asker was using last when developing ZMES.

[Beetleboy]

I can give you some of my experiences in setting up an EZVIZ DB1C camera recently for my daughters house. Zoneminder is running on a Raspberry pi 4, with two other cameras, so resources are somewhat constrained. I live in Canada and I did not find a whole lot of choice in doorbell cams, at a reasonable price here. You may want to check the ipcamtalk website, they have a lot of info on all ip cameras including doorbell ones.
In short, this turned out to be more of a chore than I thought. EZVIZ does want to lock you into their infrastructure and cloud. I did get an EZVIZ account to setup the camera but I am not sure that it’s totally necessary knowing what I know now. Using their app I was able to get the RTSP stream from the camera, but there is not a lot of useful configuration in the app. The camera is not ONVIF compatible so I had to do some digging for that from the ipcamtalk website. The initial main stream was H265, 1532x1532 at 15 frames a second. That completely overwhelmed the Raspberry pi. Using the app I could reduce the resolution between three settings, but none of them really worked well on the pi. This camera apparently is the same basic camera as hikvision and RCA, and one suggestion was to use the hikvision batch configuration tool. This indeed works well on this camera and gave me access to change a lot of things the EZVIZ app does not provide. I was able to switch the stream to H264, 1024x1024 at 10 frames a second, and change the key frame interval to 10. I now do camera pastthru video rather than having zoneminder create a video with each event, and I can see the live stream. I also added a couple of zones to reduce the size of the area I analyze for motion detection. It now works quite well on zoneminder on the pi, and the normally load factor on the pi for all three cameras is around 1.5-2, so quite acceptable. I also tried updating the firmware from what was on the camera originally, and the current version is problematic, it drops the link to the router periodically, and although it doesn’t appear to affect how it runs on zoneminder, I dropped back to the original release. I now runs with very little problem. There was nothing in the new release that was useful to me. The camera now runs entirely without the EZVIZ app, and I have in fact blocked it from any internet access at all. The only thing I would like to have that I can’t seem to do with the hikvision app is to set a time server, there is only a preset list of time servers available.
I did try running the camera on the low res sub stream and triggering high res recording, but that overwhelmed the pi as well. And by the way it does record audio fine in zoneminder.

So a bit long winded, but it is possible to make this camera work for you on zoneminder. Having more powerful hardware would probably make a lot of the above issues moot. I do find the hikvision batch configuration tool almost mandatory however if you want to twiddle anything but basic settings.

[Maximo1970]

Thanks for the updates. Very much appreciated, fuel for thought.

In terms of Hardware running ZoneMinder, I'm running on VMware so have plenty of horse power available both in terms of CPU and RAM.

[geraldbrandt]

I run the Amcrest 1080P camera: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZJ ... UTF8&psc=1

I Modect in low res and trigger the hires to record.

lores: rtsp://admin:xxxxx@172.23.4.53/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=01&authbasic=xxxxx
hires: rtsp://admin:xxxxx@172.23.4.53/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=00&authbasic=xxxxx

temp.jpg (573.08 KiB) Viewed 6306 times

[mikb]

The only thing I would like to have that I can’t seem to do with the hikvision app is to set a time server, there is only a preset list of time servers available.

You may be able to fake the camera out, if it has a list of hostnames/domains (not baked in IP addresses), you could spoof this in your local DHCP configuration, or at your firewall maybe.

e.g. camera looks for "time.cloudything.com" or "time.chinesespyware.com" or...

You put in entries for these domains in your network, so they resolve to 192.168.X.Y within YOUR network, where you run your own NTP server, or point them at the IP address of a known-good NTP server on the internet.

I had to do this with NAS/Cameras here, where setting my own local NTP server under "custom" was completely ignored, they still kept trying (and failing) to access the internet beyond my firewall. Now, they happily think they accessing one of their "preset" time servers. They're not.