On 09/15/2014 07:09 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have a customer whose with a long term project which
> includes about 30 IP cameras.  He wants to both view and
> record.   Anyone know or have a favorite Linux server
> for such?
>
> Many thanks,
> -T

I highly recommend "motion":

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

I have it currently running with 18 webcams of VGA resolution.  Motion 
is reading the cameras at 5 fps, storing only frames with motion 
including a timestamp and the motion region "boxed", and serving the 
images at 1 fps to live viewers.  All these settings are configurable 
but those are suitable for my security purposes.

It works fine on an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor currently consuming 
approx 175% CPU time (almost 2 cores) but the processor is running in 
idle (800 MHz) clock speed mode due to the reduced priority I give to 
the motion process.  Theoretically this looks like it could scale to 
more than 100 cameras with this same CPU running full clock speed.

Since only frames with motion are stored the disk activity is relatively 
low most of the time.  However, each image is about 50 kB and at 5 per 
second that could be 250 kB/s per camera with continuous motion. 
Extended to 100 cameras that would be 25 MB/s which is still not that bad.

The software runs 24x7 and despite the enormous amount of traffic it 
processes it has been rock solid.  Honestly I don't remember the last 
time it gave me issues.

As for live view I use a separate system.  I built a webpage for groups 
of 6 cameras in a 3 wide by 2 high grid.  That works out to 1920x960 
which fits nicely on a 1080p widescreen monitor.  Then I use a java 
viewer (cambozola) to stream the video inside the browser.  3 
screens/browser windows show all 18 cameras.  Obviously this would need 
to scale up with the number of cameras.

Jeff