NVR software for Raspberry Pi 3B+ (4GB) or 4 (8 GB) - any recommendations?

M

martinu

n3wb
Oct 18, 2021
4
1
UK
I've got a Foscam FI8910W security camera at present (I had two but one has just failed!) and I'm looking to expand my home security with a couple of additional IP cameras (maybe ditching the Foscam as it's only 640x480 and also the image has lots of compression artifacts).

I have a couple of Raspberry Pis (Raspberry PiOS) which I'm using for other tasks: the Pi 3B+ runs Cumulus to log weather-station data, the Pi 4 runs TVHeadend to use as a PVR for recording TV programmes.

Is there any NVR software that people would recommend that would run on one of the Pi's for doing motion-detection and recording video clips when triggered? I'd be writing to a spinning (as opposed to solid-state) USB hard drive.
 
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There would probably be 2-3 cameras, each 1280x720 or 1920x1080 resolution, connected by 5 GHz wifi. So a fairly small setup - not a large number of cameras!
 
What would you record to with the Pi? I also have a Pi4 I bought a couple of years ago to run CumulusMX, but never got around to getting it working. You would probably need some external cooling, as I would think the little heatsinks would get hot very quick. I had a POE hat for mine and that fan ran virtually all of the time trying to keep the temp around 150F. II guess you might be able to record video to a external USB SSD. I had a program for Chrome called MYIPCAM. It seemed to work ok. No bells or whistles. That might run on a PI. You can download and run a trial version of it for free.
 
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Smilingreen said:
What would you record to with the Pi?
Click to expand...

A spinning (not SSD) hard drive, as I said in my original post - although I gather that SSDs are OK for laarge files written sequentially: it's lots of small writes and deletions all over the disk which can shorten an SSD's life.


Smilingreen said:
I also have a Pi4 I bought a couple of years ago to run CumulusMX, but never got around to getting it working.
Click to expand...

I got it working fairly easily. It needs a dependent package, mono, to be installed first. And then you need to identify which device (/dev/ttyUSBn) your weather station is connected to. If you've got any problems, I may be able to help, or the Cumulus forum Cumulus Support - Index page may be able to.

Smilingreen said:
You would probably need some external cooling, as I would think the little heatsinks would get hot very quick. I had a POE hat for mine and that fan ran virtually all of the time trying to keep the temp around 150F. II guess you might be able to record video to a external USB SSD. I had a program for Chrome called MYIPCAM. It seemed to work ok. No bells or whistles. That might run on a PI. You can download and run a trial version of it for free.
Click to expand...
I'll try MYIPCAM and see what it can do, checking the CPU load and temperature. I am wondering whether a dedicated NVR mght be a better buy. The Pi was my first thought because it can be accessed from outside my LAN using Real VNC, but I hadn't appreciated that a lot of transcoding is needed between the camera's output (typically MJPEG) and a standard recording format (MPEG or H264). At present I use the camera's built-in motion detection and ability to email a sequence of still pictures.
 
The PI isn't the best at dealing with video due to the bottleneck of the sdcard. They perform better with an ssd via usb3 caddy but at this stage the cost is about the same as a tp-link VIGI 8 channel, which is better designed for the job. You will need a heatsink and possibly a fan/fan case as the PI would be working pretty hard. Wifi cameras eat wireless bandwidth so keep the cameras on a separate wifi network too. MotioneyeOS is pretty good software for the pi now it connects to network cams as well as attached cams (usb) but quite fussy with some IP cameras.
 
If stills (I tried recording video, and my Pi2, was working too hard) are good enough for you, you can use motion:
You can define mask zone (to avoid recording movement in places you don't care).
This is not reliable as always recording video, but if you don't want to buy anything else (you still need storage for the picures, USB 3 stick should be enough) that what you got, this is good enough, in my opinion.
github.com

GitHub - Motion-Project/motion: Motion, a software motion detector. Home page: https://motion-project.github.io/

Motion, a software motion detector. Home page: https://motion-project.github.io/ - Motion-Project/motion
github.com github.com

Motion

motion-project.github.io motion-project.github.io
 
Try Orchid Core from IpConfigure. They have a version specifically made for a Pi. Core is fully unlocked and free, but the do limit you to four cameras per core server install. However, if you have multiple Pi’s to use within your system, you can also install the enterprise level software, Fusion. This will allow you to link multiple Core servers together and view them all right from Fusion on another computer within your network. Because this is a browser based VMS, it’s very lightweight and will have no issues running on a single board device. Hope this helps.
 
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