ZoneMinder Forums

If this has already been raised, please forgive me. I have been searching throughout the forum but haven't seen this idea brought up.

Has anyone considered modifying ZM to work as an NDVR as a service to a customer base? Group the cameras, and only allow certain users access to their group of cameras, while the admin (or admins) can manage all the groups?

I work for a telco/ISP, and we have quite a few surveillance systems set up for our business customers. The problem is that the DVRs all seem to age quickly and badly, and we have had a few stolen during a burglary, the thieves taking the evidence with them when they leave. Having the DVR off-site would ensure that the video cannot be lost.

On the residential side, DVRs are usually too expensive for the average consumer, whereas an NDVR could be more cost-effective for those customers.

Being able to create separate storage rules for each customer would be helpful as well. Things like disk quotas, number of cameras, etc.

I think this would be a great application option for ZM if it was developed.

As far as I know, several deployments of ZM do just this.
You can create multiple users in ZM and assign them view rights for only a subset of cameras.

ZM also has a "Group" functionality where you can group set of monitors. However, I don't see a mechanism to allow configured users to only see specific groups - I might have missed it, though. That would have been easier than selecting multiple monitors per user.

Oh, OK... I haven't installed it yet, so I haven't been exposed to anything except the user guide and other documentation. I must have missed it in there...

Thanks for the reply!

Alex

OK, so I have it installed... What a great product! Kudos to the developers!

So, my original question pertained to ZM as a service. And, I see the features that asker mentioned: the ability to restrict a user to a certain set of cameras, the ability to group cameras. And as he said, there doesn't seem to be a way to tie or limit a user to a group of cameras, which would simplify administration.

There is also not an easy way to determine how much disk space is being used by any particular camera or group of cameras. A controlled quota system would be really nice for this type of deployment: when the space dedicated to a user's camera group (or per camera, maybe) becomes fully utilized, start deleting the oldest recordings as needed to save the newest events. A "lock event" function would be a additional feature, so those that are locked cannot be deleted without an interactive process with the user.

These are just a few ideas that I came up with to enhance ZM's functionality. I hope someone sees the value in them and could work on implementing them; if I was any type of coder, I would help. Unfortunately, I don't have those skills and have to rely on the good graces of those who can!

Thanks for any consideration of these ideas...

Alex