ZoneMinder Forums

Hi! We're looking to set up a security camera network for the neighborhood I live in, and I'm looking for some feedback.

This is a historic neighborhood in the city of Detroit with a fair amount of crime, actually not that much violent crime but quite a bit of property crime. Our neighborhood association doesn't have a ton of money, so we're looking for something where the individual neighbors can bear most of the cost. We've come up with a rough plan that I think could work well, here it is:

What We Are Looking For in a Neighborhood Security Camera Network:
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* A camera network which is mostly paid for by homeowners/businesses -- They pay for cameras, network connections and installation.
* Our neighborhood association only pays for the server which stores the camera footage, preferably in the range of $1000-$5000, and/or an annual server maintenance fee.
* Must provide archiving of camera footage with motion detection, available over the internet through a website (probably using ZoneMinder).
* Must provide access to live footage over the internet for those who have joined the network (does not need to be high-frame-rate).
* Must allow a wide variety of types of cameras on the network, hi-res and lo-res, analog and digital, color and infrared, depending on the homeowner's need, we don't want to get locked into one brand.
* Homeowner connectivity cost should be minimal, preferably using a homeowner's existing broadband internet connection, and minimizing broadband traffic by only uploading footage through the internet when motion is detected.
* The big benefit to the homeowner is that they get free archiving and web-based viewing for their cameras, and some cameras which are designated as "public" could be viewed by a number of people for additional security.

Possible Approaches:
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* For homeowners, probably one approach -- They pay for cameras & installation, they must already have a broadband internet connection, and the installed cameras will upload motion-detected images through the internet (to a server running ZoneMinder or similar). We need to have a local security company which we can rely on to install these.
* For the server, a few options:
1. We could pay on a monthy/annual basis to have a server provided for us which runs ZoneMinder or similar camera archiving and web viewing software. It could be a local security provider, or even someone in a different city, it doesn't really have to be local. They would give us access to add new users and do some configuring, and they provide tech support and keep the system up & running.
2. Or, we could rent or set up our own server space, and install ZoneMinder ourselves and maintain it ourselves. This could save us a lot of money, and might be feasible since I have some technical expertise, but I don't want this to become a full-time job for myself, and it could become tricky to find someone else to hand it over to if I moved on at some point.
* (There are other approaches, such as a special neighborhood wireless network (WAN) with a server on the same network, which would mean neighbors wouldn't need broadband internet, and performance would be better, but that is probably more complicated than what we want right now.)


Are these approaches feasible? Are there other neighborhoods or community/business groups out there with setups like the above?

Does anyone here provide "ZoneMinder Hosting" that we could pay to help host this system?

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

(p.s. I just donated $25 via PayPal. If we get some good advice to get our installation going with ZoneMinder, I'll donate a much larger amount. )

Our neighborhood association only pays for the server which stores the camera footage, preferably in the range of $1000-$5000, and/or an annual server maintenance fee.

depending on what you do this is probably overkill a simple desktop pc should suffice like
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... &CatId=332
and then you could add a few 1tb hardrives to it.

Next in the fps range I would recommend 1-2fps so it doesn't kill a connection. also no more than 640x480res
Mjpeg @320x240 1FPS is 82KBs
@640x480 1FPS is 330KBs
http://www.axis.com/products/video/desi ... ulator.htm

which you can see is going be a problem on the server side download
so my suggestion is to have a few "servers" running with wireless and internet access at various points. Also as far as anolog cams anyone who has one needs a network digitizer also.

* (There are other approaches, such as a special neighborhood wireless network (WAN) with a server on the same net

personally that what I think is the best option see but also multiple servers is the key http://www.avalanwireless.com/product_list.htm

also how big is the area and estimated houses that will be involved

Also you can message me on IM if you want to have a open talk about it forums are just slow for this.

Edit: As a side note zoneminder can have rules per user so userA can only acces userA's cameras and cant see userB's cameras

If you decide to go with a network cameras you need to remember bandwidth. IP cameras are bandwidth hungry and four or five will gladly eat up your ~30mbit wireless connection.

Airlive makes a decent outdoor LOS transmitter / receiver AP / WISP / Bridge /*: http://www.airlive.com/product/product_ ... 5958289794

They run around $135 each and have front LEDs for easy on the spot configuration and SSH / SNMP for remote monitoring.

We currently do not have these in stock but should have them in soon.

Thanks for the replies so far...

Yeah, $5000 would be overkill for the server hardware, that's more of an upper price we're looking at if we pay someone to set up and maintain the whole thing. If we do it ourselves it should be a lot cheaper.

I agree that we'd need to go with a low framerate like 1-2fps. This (or maybe faster) should work with a neighborhood WAN at least, I'd think.

If we just went with individuals' broadband internet connections for uploading, I wonder if it would even work, or if people would get in trouble with their internet providers/hit bandwidth limits. A key would be configuring motion detection properly so that it's not constantly uploading, but I could see that sometimes it might not be configured properly and you'd have problems with people hitting their limits.

So a neighborhood WAN would be more robust, but would require more set up (setting up the WAN)...

Anyhow, the number of homes involved is unknown, basically it will probably start with just 3 or 5 homes, but would hopefully gradually grow to 10 or 20 or more participating. (which could eventually mean 20 or 50 or 100 cameras...) I don't see that as a big issue, we would probably just add additional servers as we needed more capacity. The bigger issue for me is just getting this started with something that will work.

The entire neighborhood is about 1 mile long by 1/4 mile wide, with 350 homes.

Yeah, we would definitely make use of the rules about userA only accessing userA's cameras etc in ZoneMinder...

Well one option is seeing about avoiding the WAN requirement. At 1-2fps if the location has either a wireless network in range, a cable modem or dsl line, you are looking at fairly low bandwidth requirements. You would have the zone minder server pull the data from all the cameras and the re-distribute the feeds to one or more people who wanted to monitor it.

It is a good and interesting ideas, cameras can be a good way to really help cut down in smaller crimes assuming they can capture something useful. Centralizing this could obviously help a good bit more with centeralizing some of the footage for rapid resolution of crimes.

For what its worth I am local (Surrounding Detroit) to you so if you need some assitance may be able to help.

Yeah, it would be nice to avoid the complication of setting up a WAN, at least at first.

I've been going back & forth on whether I want to try to set it up myself, or hire someone else to do it. (I am only doing this on a volunteer basis.) I think the ideal situation would be in between, where we're able to hire someone on a part-time basis to help me set it up. Some sort of security consultant/zoneminder admin at a reasonable rate. Then if something happened that I could no longer work on the project, the neighborhood could still rely on this person to keep the system working.

Currently, I'm thinking that I will try to set something up myself, possibly with the help of a part-time consultant. Something like this:
* I will skip the neighborhood WAN idea for now, we could add that later to improve performance.
* A neighbor of mine actually runs a bunch of servers out of his house with high bandwith for his business, and he's offered to let us set up a server there. I'll probably just buy a pc like the one kingofkya suggested, add a few harddrives to it, install Linux & Zoneminder, and hook it up over there.
* The homeowner cameras could be digital or analog, configured to only upload images when motion is detected at 1 or 2 fps, connected to the homeowner's broadband internet connection. For analog cameras, we'd use an analog-digital video server for motion detection and to connect to the internet. (Something like the Vivotek VS2403 4-Channel Video Server. I'm sure I'll be back here looking for more specific suggestions.)
* We already have a private security company that patrols the neighborhood and monitors homeowner alarm systems, they have some (limited) experience with camera installs, so we could recommend them for homeowner camera installs. That or the security consultant.

I might run this by a few security companies to see what they would charge to host & manage the whole thing themselves, but I'm thinking that would probably be over our budget (up to $5000/year).

Only submitting video when there is motion detection may be more work than it is worth, atleast with IP cameras. You can buy cheap wired or wireless IP cameras for $100-200 which could most likely do a lot of good for some people however none of them will have a decent way to only submit frames on motion. Although as said at 1-2 fps the draw of bandwidth would be quite minimal so having them constantly feed may be cheaper and easier.

The trick here is to obviously keep the per monitoring node cost as low and easy as possible to encourage as many people as you can to start doing it. Nice cameras are certainly more helpful than cheap $100-200 cameras. But for the situation you are in it may be more worthwhile to have 30 cheap cameras in various locations than 3 high quality cameras in only a few areas. In the best scenario you would have a decent quality camera here and there to help with identification and positive ID and cheaper ones in many other places to get more complete coverage.


Just my thoughts, certainly take them with a grain of salt.

curtishall wrote:If you decide to go with a network cameras you need to remember bandwidth. IP cameras are bandwidth hungry and four or five will gladly eat up your ~30mbit wireless connection.

Airlive makes a decent outdoor LOS transmitter / receiver AP / WISP / Bridge /*: http://www.airlive.com/product/product_ ... 5958289794

They run around $135 each and have front LEDs for easy on the spot configuration and SSH / SNMP for remote monitoring.

We currently do not have these in stock but should have them in soon.

thank for the resource info, we still improving our security cameras in our home..


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Adt security

You might check out the Meraki Outdoor wireless... You could use set up a camera or two in each home, recording to an old PC, then each home could be linked together with meraki outdoor antenna...


Using the private network feature, any of the homeowners could view any of the recording servers that were on the network?

Then you could have a central server that certain archived events were uploaded to based on filtering rules... or just a central web server that had links to all the different cameras.