Commercial "security systems" are often designed as a monitoring system with little attention to recording quality. In such a system, locating and exporting relevant video can be challenging and often requires extensive human intervention. ZoneMinder was designed to provide the best possible record quality while allowing easy searching, filtering and exporting of security footage.
ZoneMinder is designed around a series of independent components that only function when necessary, limiting any wasted resource and maximising the efficiency of your machine. An outdated Pentium II PC can have multiple recording devices connected to it, and it is able to track one camera per device at up to 25 frames per second, which drops by approximately half for each additional camera on the same device. Additional cameras on devices that do not interact with other devices can maintain the 25 frame rate per second. Monitoring several cameras will not overload the CPU as frame processing is designed to synchronise with capture.
A fast video interface core, a user-friendly and comprehensive PHP based web interface allows ZoneMinder to be efficient, friendly and most importantly useful. You can control and monitor your cameras from home, at work, on the road, or a web-enabled cell phone. It supports variable web capabilities based on available bandwidth. The web interface also allows you to view events that your cameras have captured, which can be archived, reviewed or deleted. The web application directly interacts with the core daemons ensuring full co-operation at all times. ZoneMinder can also be installed as a system service to reboot a system remotely.
The core of ZoneMinder is the capture and analysis of images and a highly configurable set of parameters that eliminate false positives whilst ensuring minimum loss of footage. For example, you can define a set of 'zones' for each camera of varying sensitivity and functionality. This eliminates zones that you don't wish to track or define areas that will alarm if various thresholds are exceeded in conjunction with other zones.
ZoneMinder is free under GPL License, but if you do find it useful, then please feel free to visit https://zoneminder.com/donate/ and help us fund our future improvements.
