How to build a monitoring system with an infra cam?

Question

I need to place 2 USB (?) webcams that are looking at two doors. No sound needed, just a few things:

video files must be saved at least for 30 days (I have two eee pc's for the two webcams, so cable length doesn't matter)
video quality must be good enough [@night too! - infra cam needed]
timestamp on the video image

I have a netbook that can do the recording. OS: OpenBSD

It is hard to see the connection to Unix or Linux at your question. — Hanan, Dec 21 '11 at 06:17

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 22 '11 at 07:21

3

You can try a ZoneMinder SW...

answered Dec 22 '11 at 07:21

Jan Marek

3,937

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 22 '11 at 12:51

1

Other than zoneminder, which may be a bit overkill, try motion should be in the fedora repos, and is kicking about for rhel5 somewhere.

answered Dec 22 '11 at 12:51

Sirex

7,956

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 22 '11 at 13:33

I would not use an USB webcam for it. Especially since the size limit of those (5m indeed). Also each webcam would require a seperate controller due to the bandwidth requirements.

Software like motion also supports IP webcams that output an MJPEG stream.

Consider buying a webcam with infrared leds unless the lighting is always guaranteed to be good. Well unless you decide to go for a Philips USB webcam with PWC chipset: those handle bad lighting pretty good. Other's produce lots of noise which gives problems when detecting motion.

Had very good experience with http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome (but I might be a little prejudiced).

How to build a monitoring system with an infra cam?

3 Answers3