Is ZoneMinder the right choice for my Application

[keenedge]

Hi,

I have 8 IP security cameras (a mix of Axis, Panasonic and Toshiba). I need to record full motion, continuous video from these cameras for about 12 hours a day.

Then some time later I need to be able to programmatically extract certain should clips from the recordings. i.e. "Get 10.3 seconds of video starting at 3:01:59.007pm yesterday and store it in "video01.avi"

- Is ZoneMinder suitable for this?

- Can a single PC handle 25fps recording from 8 cameras? What hardware would you recommend to handle 8 cameras?

Thanks in advance.

[56pit]

I'm still very new to ZM, but I have 7 cameras on a quad core system and it is under utilized.

Out of the 7 cameras only two are IP and the other 5 are BNC.

The part I'm not sure about and I'm sure someone else can answer is being able to extract a certain time frame out. WIth the 12 hour recording times you can have the recordings split into 15minute sections. Also there are a good number of choices to export the recording to:
avi
mpg
mpeg
wmv
mov
asf
swf
or 3gp

[keenedge]

Thanks for the reply,

Are you doing full frame rate continuous recording (25fps 640x480) on all 7 cameras?

[56pit]

15fps is what I normally run.
5 of the cameras are set at 320x240 and 2 are set at 640x480
all are set for color

I made the mistake of picking up an IP camera that was not Zoneminder friendly. I am only able to get 15fps and 320x240 out of it. It is a Level-One dome camera.

[Flash_]

The recording side of what you want is fine.

The difficult bit, as far as I can see, is the "fetch xx at yy and put in zz". That certainly isn't supported out of the box, but you may be able to do something clever with scripting and the mysql database directly to locate files from a specific camera that match the timespans, then create a video from those .jpg files. I think that could work, but you'd need to put some effort into coding it.