ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I am just building a new system which is going to use 4-5 cameras. I want them to run in modect and use coloured images at full pal size.

At the moment I am not quite sure if I will use IP cams or get a a capture board and wire analog cams directly.

What hardware am I expected to need? I know that my P3 600 can handle one wired cam quite well but I think 4 or 5 of these are too much.
Most queries in this forum asking for hardware tips were for much larger setups so that they didn't help me...

Greets,

Salix

From my experience at the moment ZM still performs far better with analog cameras than with IP-Cameras.

If you have the possibility from the installation point of view to use analog cameras a simple P4 (you might also get away with a fast P3) with a decent capture card and 512MB+ RAM should be able to handle a couple of analog cameras with fairly decent performance. Obviously a decent capture card helps with performance because it takes some workload of the CPU.

I am running an P4 (no dual core, just HT) with 1GB RAM 3-5 AXIS Cameras and this setup deliveres about 5 FPS @ 640x480. More RAM only results in slightly better performance, but if you are going to do a lot of recording, ergo a lot of disk usage I would invest in some fast disks like the [b]Western Digital Raptors [/b] or a RAID Setup with a real RAID controller not the cheap onboard or RAID lvl 1 or 0 ones.

Zoneminder /is/ slower with IP cams because it needs to decrypt each jpeg - n times a second - wheras the analogue system presents them into memory ready to scan.

That said, modern processors shift a lot of stuff and 4-5 cameras isn't going to stretch any recent computer that much.

Each route has its own benefits and drawbacks;

IP:
Plus: Dead easy to cable - even wireless. Established protocols and cheap network hardware. Easily moved around, as is server. Cameras can be addressed by other computers simultaneously without putting any load on the server and shareable across the internet. Very extensible. Quite often offer a wide range of resolutions.
Minus: Cameras cost more. Relatively limited range compared to the mature analogue market. The cheaper end are mickey-mouse and crap.
- there are a lot that require Internet explorer and only do mpeg4.

Analogue:
Plus: Cheaper cams, better choice, more reliable/predictable fps.
Minus: Dedicated per-cam wiring meaning each camera needs a cable back to the server, making it hard to physically move the server.

Both suffer from PCI/NIC bandwidth and disk I/O bottleneck issues in large configurations. All things being equal, the IP cams will hit the CPU barrier before the analogues.

Thank your for your advices. At the moment I think I am going to use analogue cameras because the whole package seems to be cheaper or deliver better quality at the same price.

What range can I expect to be covered without a problem and without using BNC->TP converters. Is it possible to reach 20m-25m? I don't think that cams or computer will be moved so that wiring will be no prolem if I can manage to cross the distance...

coax (decent coax) will take a colour pal camera about 250m so you should be fine at 25!