Camera Software

Other Devices & Integrations Door Locks & Sensors
#1

Anyone using any type of software or system to record from their ip cameras? I just bought one foscam 8918 and will be adding a few more cameras to my house in the very near future. I wanted to know if anyone else incorporated their cameras into software or a dedicated system?

  • Garrett
#2

BlueIris (software) work great for wireless and wired camera’s

#3

I use (already owned) a 4 channel qsee dvr. It was about $200, has very good night cameras, constantly records or motion records to a 250gb dvr, and has a great iPhone app.

It also is able to be viewed in Vera, so snapshots can be saved based on events. The Vera integration is not much use, though. I mainly use the iPhone.

It is, however, all wired.

#4

thanks for the tips. i just also bought a foscam 8918 a week ago and already setup and working with the free iphone app “cam viewer” and integrated with vera. to use FTP to capture and record images is just too complicated for me. i will explore more on this blue iris software and the qsee dvr you guys mentioned here.

#5

I can second the Blue Iris. I have been using it for a while and I like it. BTW stay away from Active Webcam I used it for a while and it was horrible. My favorite however is the Panasonic software that came with the older BL-C131 cameras, but I believe it only works with Panasonic and it costs ~$300 for the full version.
I will hopefully be testing out the Sony HD dvr with some HD cameras here soon at work as well.

#6

Blue Iris is amazing, especially if you try its motions detection features
Foscams don’t seem to keep up though

#7

I have blue iris on one of my computers. I will be testing it out. I just have to find a better way to incorporate it into my setup. I have a VM server that runs a few linux servers. I could install a windows vm on the system, however, I do need to upgrade the system. It is an amd x4 9150e with 8GB of ram. The server is being used for dns, webserver, dhcp, ssh and openvpn services as well as for my file shares. So I may have to upgrade the server to beef up the specs. Or for now also leave my other computer on as well that has blue iris software installed. However, I dual boot both windows and linux. So it looks like I have some planning to do. I do like the software so far and like how it has a lot of options and the price can not be beat.

  • Garrett
#8

I’m hoping to use the one that comes with the vera2. There is a option “Number of seconds to archive the video after the sensors(s) are tripped”

#9

I’m using zone minder. Works great with vera.

Vera pulls jpegs and streams from zoneminder, so i got zoneminder which is more specialized software for video surveillance, and then vera on top of zoneminder, so no hassle with camera compability and vera.

Didn’t have any time to look at blue iris so i can’t compare but zoneminder is worth a look.

#10

[quote=“habbe, post:9, topic:169046”]I’m using zone minder. Works great with vera.

Vera pulls jpegs and streams from zoneminder, so i got zoneminder which is more specialized software for video surveillance, and then vera on top of zoneminder, so no hassle with camera compability and vera.

Didn’t have any time to look at blue iris so i can’t compare but zoneminder is worth a look.[/quote]

Thanks for the tip on zoneminder. I am checking it out now. So you have been pretty happy with the software? Do you have any complaints?

  • Garrett
#11

Thumbs up from me for two pieces of software which both work great with IP cameras:

[ul][li]Motion: free webcam software for Linux, even runs on embedded systems.[/li]
[li]EvoCam for Mac OS X.[/li][/ul]

#12

[quote=“garrettwp, post:10, topic:169046”]Thanks for the tip on zoneminder. I am checking it out now. So you have been pretty happy with the software? Do you have any complaints?

  • Garrett[/quote]

I was looking for something that handles h.264 natively, it turns out zoneminder converts everything to jpeg or mjpegs but in the end it works very well for my application.
The ubuntu repos doesn’t have the latest version, and there are some strange memory mapping (shared mem) in the core app. Customization is done thru perl scripts (not my cup of tea).

Not really any big issues. the good part it’'s really stable has been running for months on my atom 330 2gig ram. The motion detection is single threaded (per cam i think) so make sure you make you zones as small as possible, did end up with 100% cpu on one core/thread when i was running motion detection on the whole area.

#13

How did you setup Vera to run off zoneminder?

I was thinking of ways to integrate Vera with Blue Iris - its motion detection and h.264 recording features are excellent, and it pretty much impossible to achieve same level using Vera hardware or remote servers. Video still has to be processed locally.
What would be perfect is to teach Blue Iris to trigger Vera events (easy), and to be able to have remote access to locally stored video/images via mios servers.

Speaking of motion detection and CPU load, I ran it on 2 cameras so far, and i7 CPU is almost at zero - looks like it’s heavily optimized, which a good thing.

#14

[quote=“325xi, post:13, topic:169046”]I was thinking of ways to integrate Vera with Blue Iris - its motion detection and h.264 recording features are excellent, and it pretty much impossible to achieve same level using Vera hardware or remote servers. Video still has to be processed locally.
What would be perfect is to teach Blue Iris to trigger Vera events (easy), and to be able to have remote access to locally stored video/images via mios servers.[/quote]

I’m trying out Blue Iris also. Very nice program. Has any work been done, or does anyone have tips, to make vera and blue iris play together?

A plugin would be amazing.

#15

Bump on Blue Iris… great software… would love to integrate with Vera.