To give you an idea of what I am trying to do, Axis makes some video appliances that essentially turn an analog video camera into an IP camera, and then something like ZM can talk to that appliance. The idea would be to have multiple linux boxes with simple USB camera, or analog camera and capture card, and the ZM server could talk to the boxes with the cameras. Can ZM operate in a client / server mode like this? Or is there another application(s) that can work with ZM in this way?
It might be interesting to have say an Axis PTZ camera, and then an external embedded Linux box to control it which in turn could be controlled by a remote ZM server. Perhaps the controller could be running the LiveCD ZM from a USB flash drive. The end result might be too expensive to be worth it, but maybe it could have some applications. I have seen some very small linux computers with ethernet, wifi, and serial ports, haven't looked into something with video capture built in as yet.