Anyone do a 'roll your own' NVR with a low power PC or other device?

T

tombodet

n3wb
Apr 17, 2018
2
0
What I'm currently doing now is using a Synology DiskStation and the 2 free licenses for their security software that come with it to cover the front and back door. I currently have 4 (or was it 5...) Dahua cams of varying style I bought a little while ago and never got around to mounting them so a proper recording setup has been on the back burner.

FFWD to this morning with the county Sheriff knocking on the door looking for anyone that saw something last night with a spat of break-ins to vehicles and now I have renewed vigor to get this done. My front cam caught a figure walking around my truck trying the doors, but position and lighting suck because they're not mounted properly.

Back on topic, the DiskStation licenses are $50 a pop and lock me in to that software. I don't know how many cams it can handle as it's not one of the heftier units so there's concern there. Again 2 cams and their software, it runs fine enough. I've tried other Docker containerized options and the only one that I liked the way it drove was Shinobi. The issue was it was a pig and couldn't handle watching more than one cam at a time, despite me even using low res substreams.

I've been looking at some of the Dahua NVRs and I'd really like to keep this under $500, so I was thinking what about getting a micro PC to do the crunching and short term video recording, then offload older recordings to the DiskStation.

I would assume I will have a couple 4k cams in the future regardless of what I have now. Most of them I think are the 2k Starvis. Some are PTZ. I have a POE switch already configured for a cam network. I work with Linux in my job so I'd prefer that as the option.

What the ask here is if anyone has bought a low power PC (just for example this: ) and run an open source NVR project for recording. How does it work, how much power does the computer have, etc... I'm looking for suggestions, caveats, protips and the like.

Thanks for reading!
 
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What is the model of your disk station? You can look up on Synology's website how many cameras your DS can support.

I too had the police knocking on my door at 2AM one morning asking for the same information as you stated. The police knew I had cameras as I helped a home robbery in my area in the past.

I use both BI and a few Synology units (NVR and DS's) as if one system goes down I have a system that is always up. You can also hide one of the systems somewhere in your location so if you ever have a robbery that they will not find one of them. Having a token NVR that they think that have deactivated if the break in occurs keeps them from completely destroying your entire network infrastructure.

About the Synology licenses, they follow you and can be moved if you ever upgrade your NAS later. Yes they are $$$$ but if you but the higher number licenses are cheaper at one time. I do like the interface of Synology's Surveillance Station better than BI ( but that's just me) Plus I like to also use the Synology for data backups so it's a 2-in-1 device.

For the Micro PC just make sure it's Intel based and read the PC Wiki on this site for BI.
 
DS216+ Based on the datasheet it'll do 16 cams at 720, total 480FPS. I have no idea how that translates as the resolution goes up. Synology just released a new series more surveillance centric, the DVA1622 and it comes w/8 licenses. It's attractive, but a little higher priced than I was looking and that's without disks.

In my head I was thinking something like an air cooled low watt CPU small form factor box, put Linux on it and run one of the open source projects.
 
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