ZoneMinder is a nice idea and I would like to use it, but after my first experience I am somewhat disappointed. I hope that by taking the time to recount in brief my experience it will help make ZoneMinder a better tool.
A few weeks back I installed ZoneMinder on Linux. The first thing I notices is it had a lot of dependences. But I got it installed and tried to use my web camera to test it out. Never did get it to see the built in web camera, so I gave up (after about 6 hours) and went on to something else.
Since I could not find the specifications on my web-came I did not know what settings to use, so I tried a bunch of different combinations, but not knowing much about web cameras I did not know what was a likely combination of settings and what was not. I also did not know for sure how to tell if it was in fact working. I did not see any option like view-camera-image.
A week are so later I noticed my network had gotten so bad web pages would refuse to load or take a very long time. I got to thinking maybe I should removed ZoneMinder. It had installed many packages and I removed a few that had ZoneMinder in the name. I also removed Apache web server.
That did not help with my poor Internet connection. A few days later I noticed that the modem lite was blinking constantly even when I was not using my computer. So installed wireshark and found that mail.domain.actdsltmp was sending off something like twenty query's per second. The response would come back "No Such Name." So I removed nullmailer and libemail-date-format-perl since they was two packages that had mail in the name and that was installed with ZoneMinder.
That seemed to take care of the constant network traffic and poor Internet connection.
Apache, Mysql, and php are tools that should be installed and secured by trained experts and not novices. This and the difficulty of seeing if it would even recognize my camera makes me think that zoneMinder is best left to the experts.