Viktor Petersson.com
Posts Tagged ‘ZoneMinder’
You’ve probably already noticed that I’ve used ZoneMinder a bit. I published a few blog-posts on how to set up ZoneMinder, and even posted full virtual appliance for ZoneMinder.
The problem with ZoneMinder though, in my opinion, is that it is overkill for most users. Yes, it comes with some really cool features, but if all you want to do is to snap one image per second from an IP-camera for instance, it is way too complex. Don’t get me wrong, ZoneMinder is a great application if you have complicated surveillance needs. This just wasn’t my case.
After running into some issues with ZoneMinder I decided to write a lightweight alternative, namely KISS-surveillance. It doesn’t even offer a fraction of all features ZoneMinder does, but it come with a few major benefits:
- Uses a fraction of the resources of ZoneMinder.
- Fast and easy to setup.
- No database-requirement. Just plain files.
- Only uses simple UNIX-tools like wget, crontab and Supervisor.
- If you want to view the images from a web-browser, simply configure the web-server of your choice to do an index on the given folder (I prefer Nginx).
Last week I published a new version of my ZoneMinder Virtual Appliance. The virtual appliance is great if you want to easily deploy ZoneMinder without having to spend time setting it up. However, in some situations, you want to run ZoneMinder directly on the hardware. Perhaps you need better performance or simply need to capture video streams from V4L-devices.
Since I already spent the time getting it running, I thought I’d share the instructions for getting it running. It’s pretty straight forward, but there are a few minor things that took me some time to get around.
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Last week I launched ZoneMinder VA 0.2. Unfortunately there is an issue with the image that prevents it from loading properly into VMware Server 2. The root of the problem is actually an incompatibility issue between VMware Fusion and VMware Server, but that doesn’t matter. Fortunately the workaround is pretty simple.
- Delete any vmdk.lck directries
- Delete any vmem.lck directories
- Delete the quicklook-cache.png file
- Edit the .vmx file and set to FALSE entries for USB, SOUND and SERIAL.
ZoneMinder is a great piece software. It is a very powerful video surveillance tool that can be configured with both IP cameras and regular cameras (via V4L). Unfortunately it is a bit difficult to get up and running with. A while back I needed to deploy ZoneMinder myself for a client. One thing lead to another, and I ended up with a fully working Virtual Machine for ZoneMinder. I uploaded it here just for fun, but it didn’t take long before I had was linked to from the official ZoneMinder project and the visitors started to pour in.
Today I just released version 0.2. It is using the latest LTS version of Ubuntu (10.04) and ZoneMinder 1.24.2. I’ve also reduced the size of the VM significantly. The new version is about 1GB extracted and around 350MB compressed.
For more information about the VM and how to download it, please visit this page.