General Tips for Business Deployments

[burger]

Here are some things I've learned recently with zm in commercial settings:

If you are setting up mobile phones with ZMNinja, and the wifi is the same WAN IP as the camera system, setup a VPS with a http/https proxy and point zmninja at the proxy. The proxy can be as simple as:

[pre]sudo iptables-legacy -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j
DNAT --to-destination <officeip>:80
sudo iptables-legacy -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j
DNAT --to-destination <officeip>:443
sudo iptables-legacy -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE[/pre]

Note that you might want to set nonstandard ports. If you don't do the above, customers will try to use their phones at the business to watch cameras, but they will have to go off wifi / to the cell network, and for the average user, it's too difficult. You really have to cater to the lowest denomination for software to be successful. KISS not only in code and architecture but also user experience. So make sure the customer has a stupidly simple and easy experience. (and btw a proxy might be a good option for ZM SaaS. low cost, easy to deploy, and makes certain functions easier to use without completely gatekeeping for those who are willing to put the time in).

run 2k cameras at least. people like flashy things and hi res is flashy.

users seem to like fluid video, so put high fps on low res substream. analysis fps limit to 2. we don't have (asic) hardware yet, so there are limits, but cpu is still pretty powerful. 6 fps minimum.

the more you overbuild the cpu, the faster you can go.

passthrough on hi res stream obv. watch low res stream live, expand / open window to hi res stream, ideally (custom javascript webpage could do this:todo).

use zmninja + the website. offer customers both apps. there are also some other apps available. (e.g. possibly zmsquarer).

in most cases, you should replace coax cams with ethernet. customers that are camera happy tend to like hi res, whether its needed or not, and coax is low res.

(optional) configure zmes or good blob detection. you pretty much only will be detecting people in the average business. maybe cars. For extra points, figure out how to assign names to people in zmes.

[NikoDevin]

For me, your tips on setting up a proxy for mobile access, using high-resolution cameras, and offering an app to customers are especially helpful.