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I noticed that everyone got hung up on the DVR part of the post, not the complete post which is a DVR specifically made for a security system. My department is looking into this solution which looks pretty complete.

http://www.zoneminder.com/

As others have said and according to my own research into this area, AXIS seems to have the best cameras out there, hands down. They support low lux captures better than most and their features are superb, as is their selection. For the software, I would take a look at the F/OSS ZoneMinder (http://www.zoneminder.com/) project. This project seems to have a lot of momentum behind it and supports a wide variety of cameras.

I suggested mythtv earlier but a friend pointed to http://www.zoneminder.com/

For the Mac there's SecuritySpy, and for Linux there's Zone Minder. I haven't used ZoneMinder - I can say that I've used SecuritySpy and it's a very nice solution. Not sure how well it would work out with 200 cameras though - but it can accept multiple inputs per machine so it might be worth looking into.

http://www.zoneminder.com/

ZoneMinder is pretty good. It is organised as a home security type setup, but you have options to have a streaming window open. There are seperate parts that control the streming, motion detection, so you could probably use those.

I use the same cameras (IP cameras are much more useful than USB/PC attached ones), but instead of wget, I use the annoyingly-awkward-to-configure zoneminder which is a web-based (php/mysql) motion-detection program.

I get about 4fps from the dlink cameras (using /video.cgi) and would recommend zoneminder when you have a spare server with lots of memory. Disk space is not so important though as it only saves the frames that contain motion.

It was very nice when I was on holiday recently to be able to check up on home and see that nothing whatsoever happened in my house when I was away. I am running it on my file server - an AMD 3000+ w/ 1GB RAM and the 5 min load average runs about 0.1

Zoneminder is great, it even has a live CD so you can find out how your hardware will work without having to find a drive to install it on.

I've been using it for about a year and am very happy with it.

LoB

or this

ZoneMinder

He might have used ZoneMinder for this. The pictures look like stills from the program. Zoneminder

Never tested it, but Zone minder seems promising.

How about just get one that will take a pic every time there is movement, then if someone DID break in, you would have pictures of who it was, plus insurance company can't say you didn't take enough steps.

It would be nice if there was some kind of open-source project that wrote software for this kind of thing, too...

"Multiple Zones (Regions Of Interest) can be defined per camera. Each can have a different sensitivity or be ignored altogether." http://www.zoneminder.com/documentation.html

Alarm Zones

From the zoneminders screenshot page

link to image refered image kinda says it all.

This image illustrates the zone that this monitor has. The two red ones are Active zones which will also trigger an alarm once certain conditions are met, the outline in the previous image is the same colour as the zone in which it occurs. The green image is an Inclusive image meaning it will only trigger an alarm if one has already been triggered in an Active zone. So if someone is walking around they will likely be both in the lower Active zone and the Inclusive zone and will be highlighted as such. The white zone is an Inactive zone meaning it basically gets ignored. In this case it's because there's a hanging basket there and when it's a bit windy it swings around. It could have been an Inclusive zone too but it's unlikely that a genuine event I'd be interested in would occur in that bit of the image.

Alarm Zones

From the zoneminders screenshot page

link to image refered image kinda says it all.

This image illustrates the zone that this monitor has. The two red ones are Active zones which will also trigger an alarm once certain conditions are met, the outline in the previous image is the same colour as the zone in which it occurs. The green image is an Inclusive image meaning it will only trigger an alarm if one has already been triggered in an Active zone. So if someone is walking around they will likely be both in the lower Active zone and the Inclusive zone and will be highlighted as such. The white zone is an Inactive zone meaning it basically gets ignored. In this case it's because there's a hanging basket there and when it's a bit windy it swings around. It could have been an Inclusive zone too but it's unlikely that a genuine event I'd be interested in would occur in that bit of the image.

Article page 3 mentions a "live cd" of all the
stuff by Ross Melin is available off the standard
download page here is the direct link:
http://www2.zoneminder.com/downloads/ZMliveCD_1.19 .5.isoZoneMinder LiveCD v1.19.5

Zoneminder. Has all the options you want (cellphone monitoring etc), and has motion detection and auto record features.

See http://www.zoneminder.com for more details. It supports multiple input cards and hasn't stopped recording video for me yet. I've got 8 cameras on my home security system. Dunno why nobody has mentioned this yet.

Can't believe it has not been mentioned. Use ZoneMinder. It's an open souce product available exclusively for Linux. I've been using it for the last 4 months running 8 webcams (not really webcams, cctv cameras actually) simultaneously for the last 4 months and it's pretty stable. Most of the webcam software that I deal with previously would crash every month or so, or wouldn't capture the right scenes of motion. This piece of software supports some of the multi-input cards on the market.

I cannot believe nobody has mentioned the linux solution for motion-detection scanning capabilities!! I've been using ZoneMinder for the last several months. It's never failed on me yet. It offers tons of features for motion sensing.

http://www.zoneminder.com/ is a linux based security camera system. It detects motion and saves the jpgs when certain conditions are met. You can even have triggers for events, different kinds of zones that behave differently, and interface with X10 devices!

It is seriously great software, and 100% open source. There's even livecds (although not the latest version) so you can mess with it without installing anything.

I have it running under debian testing, and while there were a few quirks to installing it, it was generally pretty painless.

There's great support in the forums as well.

Using the Microjack 4-eyes card (way cheaper than 4 separate capture cards). It's got 4 inputs and a BT878 encoder so I have a good feeling I'll get it working.

The software I'll use is ZoneMinder.

I'll post my success. :-)

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