Advice for newbie and using Raspberry Pi cameras

[greavette]

Hello,

I've only just discovered Zoneminder and I'm very excited by what I see this project is capable of. I have 4 Raspberry Pi's with cameras. My first thought is to install Zoneminder on Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine then use these Raspberry Pi's as my remote cameras sending the feed to the Zoneminder VM.

I have a lot of reading to do to fully understand how Zoneminder works but I'm hoping this community could confirm if my initial thought of how to use Zoneminder with my Raspberry Pi cams work? Or is it best to use USB IP cameras instead?

Thank you.

[knight-of-ni]

I've never used a Raseberry Pi, but the same rules apply to this device as with any IP camera.

You tell Zoneminder what url to send to the PI to get the device to stream video back.
You can often test the url with vlc or any web browser.

[greavette]

Thank you for the reply.

I want to ensure I understand how this would work for me. So lets remove any confusion with regards to using a Raspberry Pi.

If I had Zoneminder installed on an Ubuntu Server Virtual Machine and I had a USB camera connected to a physical desktop computer also running Ubuntu elsewere in my house (not on the Virtual Server Host running Zoneminder). How do I stream video back from this physical computer with the USB camera to my Zoneminder server?

Thank you.

[knight-of-ni]

Thank you for the reply.

I want to ensure I understand how this would work for me. So lets remove any confusion with regards to using a Raspberry Pi.

If I had Zoneminder installed on an Ubuntu Server Virtual Machine and I had a USB camera connected to a physical desktop computer also running Ubuntu elsewere in my house (not on the Virtual Server Host running Zoneminder). How do I stream video back from this physical computer with the USB camera to my Zoneminder server?

Thank you.

The only documented way I know to do that would be to install zoneminder on both machines. Zoneminder knows how to talk to other zoneminder machines.

Since this is Linux after all, maybe there is some creative way you could take the local video device (e.g. the usb camera) and make it appear as a local device on the other machine.

Or perhaps you could stream that local usb device through apache web server. Then you could use the URL that points to the usb camera's video stream to program a monitor in zoneminder on the other machine.

Just some ideas. Don't know how well the last two will work, but it is something worth Googling about.

[codabiz]

You can stream a USB webcam attached to another ubuntu o/s desktop to your server machine, by installing Lavrsen's Motion software on the webcam PC. I would have thought this would work with a virtual ZM installation. Details here:

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

[pyroman]

I believe you can also use vlc to stream. I just installed it on my pi. It can capture images with Video For Linux and a few other ways. It can then send a stream. I dont have a pi with a cam so I cant test it live.

[bobbozzo]

Hi,

Any news on using Pi's as cameras with a Zoneminder server?

I'm not happy with the video/picture quality of most security cameras and the Pi's seem to be much better.

Thanks,
Bob