Not worth the time or trouble.

pete_c

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I have used Zoneminder since the analog days. Works great today with my IP cameras. I have always been a Unix, Linux and BSD person.

I have kept Microsoft Windows around for Wife and WAF but personally have changed all of my laptops / desktops to Linux.
 
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hmjgriffon

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I have used Zoneminder since the analog days. Works great today with my IP cameras. I have always been a Unix, Linux and BSD person.

I have kept Microsoft Windows around for Wife and WAF but personally have changed all of my laptops / desktops to Linux.
but does it hold a candle to blue iris? otherwise, spend the -$50.
 

nrc

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but does it hold a candle to blue iris? otherwise, spend the -$50.
Can't say for sure because I've never used it. But it does everything I need it to do and it doesn't require me to run Windows. So from my perspective it's vastly superior.
 

Pentagano

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Out of curiosity alone (BI user + a little frigate), I decided to spin up a zoneminder container on my proxmox. Just on Motion detect and was surprised how little CPU it uses. Hardly any compared to frigate. The recordings on detection are coming through/

But I'm trying to get the event server and object detection (person) working to define the objects. I believe I have followed all the steps, installed all the appropriate dependencies and updated the ini files with my cam ID's. 1,2,3,4 etc Unless I have those wrong.


But I'm a bit confused now where do the images appear with the person object defined during detection? Not on my zoneminder dashboard!


1639003150576.png
 

Pentagano

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Your title hits the nail on the head!

A week now trying this installation - yep zoneminder works fine - But the events sever OMG too many issues. Posted my issues on the zoneminder forum.

No wonder people always turn to Blue Iris,

Please don't say I didn't read the docs, read them all about 10 times over and reinstalled about 3 times with all the packages/config files set up etc etc.
Also MQTT works one time then another time no. same settings
 

tech_junkie

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Your title hits the nail on the head!

A week now trying this installation - yep zoneminder works fine - But the events sever OMG too many issues. Posted my issues on the zoneminder forum.

No wonder people always turn to Blue Iris,

Please don't say I didn't read the docs, read them all about 10 times over and reinstalled about 3 times with all the packages/config files set up etc etc.
Also MQTT works one time then another time no. same settings
looking at the code, yes its a work in progress. But there is some bad habits those programmers need to get out of because it slows the performance down. One bad habit is calling external files for functions. Mainly because it makes it more difficult to debug, but external calling drops the performance. That applies to other script based languages like Python. Their use of PHP & c++ os modules (ffmpeg) is spot on. But their bad habits are most of the timing problems they are experiencing in their event part of their code.
 

river100

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I'm no programmer but I have been using Zoneminder since 2005. I used to install DVRs & NVRs and I still prefer Zoneminder over them for myself. The versions in last few years work very well and are super easy to install. I have a Clonezilla image with Ubuntu server and defaulted Zoneminder. Drop it on any old PC or older server and go with it.
 
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mahalingam

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Until development picks up on this steaming pile of crap, I will be running blue iris. Since I was forced to actually pay for blue iris, I will probably never bother with zoneminder again. Yeah it's free, it's open source, so you technically can't complain about it, you can do what I did and go pay for something else but for anyone considering it, not worth the trouble. Whoever wrote this program did it a long time ago when cameras were crappy and everything was mjpeg and it hasn't really been updated since. The email support blows and for whatever reason it uses TONS of CPU, probably because it deals with everything as separate jpeg images. You can't run more than a few 3MP cameras on it unless you plan to have a monster thousands of dollars server.
There is a lot to agree with here. I started using ZoneMinder back in 2010 because it was free and open source. I built a pretty beefy server for it because the resource demands were so high - as noted, every frame from every camera is transcoded into a separate .jpg file and those files are all stored on the disk). I got it to the point where it worked acceptably, especially after some very smart user rewrote the critical parts using MMX assembly language instructions. However, it was still pretty fragile, and upgrading/recovering from errors was a major pain. I've been administering my own Linux systems since 1995, and still it would take me hours every time something broke or I wanted to upgrade. Finally a few years ago I said screw it and switched to BlueIris community edition. My server machine went from nearly complete utilization to a load average of < 1.0. While there are a couple of features of ZM that I miss, in general I don't regret my decision to switch.

At this point I would never recommend ZoneMinder to a beginner or to anyone who is not well experienced with Linux.
 

mahalingam

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You joined today and your first post was on a thread that was last commented on almost two years ago. We've had some bots lately that follow the same pattern so it seemed suspicious.
It's also the top thread in the subforum. My bad for not checking the date before responding. :confused:
 
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