Testing Zoneminder for company surveilance

A client requested a surveilance setup for his company locations, which includes multiple machines, entrypoints, storage halls etc.

He suprisingly had some interesting requirements:

• LAN-only operation
• no vendor lock-in when it comes to cameras
• easy to use with a smartphone
• OpenSource (if possible)
• builtin redundancy for recording
• alerting (movement detection)
• recordings must include sound

TL;DR

Zoneminder is a nice play-thing for small home user and enthuiasts but is not suitable for normal consumers du to its complexity in setup and upkeep. I had my best experience, and best customer feedback, with the solution from Synology.

the setup

Since I like the idea of using open source if sufficient, I started researching open source systems for this purpose, and installed 5 or 6 different ones. Zoneminder was the only one with sufficient documentation and a functioning install process at the time of testing, so I choose a system with an i7 (4c,8thr), 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD for system and misc, and a 1TB HDD for recording. The i7 was a 4th gen which is a bit older but should be more then enough to handle a few streams.

My client wanted to test the system by spending the least amount of money possible, which brought me to the cameras from the TP-Link Tapo series, since zoneminder and the Tapo cams support onvif and rstp.

setting up the first camera

The setup of the Tapo cameras can’t be done without internet access for the cam and the tapo app. After the initial setup you can isolate the cameras. To access the rtsp stream you need to setup an user account in the tapo app, and the stream URLs can be found online after a quick google search.

It took quite some time to figure out the correct way to specify the combination of rtps-URL and the other parameters like FPS and resolution.

motion detection and alerting

When you setup a monitor in zonemninder you can specify if you want motion detection or not, and the motion detection worked very well during my tests, and did not have any noticable effect on CPU or RAM.

look and feel

When it comes to the GUI of zoneminder you can’t expect much (my opinion).

I don’t find it intuitive and you get lost in the process of “where do I have to click now?” because there are multiple links in each monitor row and each one takes you to the monitor, the other one to the settings page. It takes some time to get used to.

The detail view of the monitor only gives you limited controll/interaction options. You can’t scroll in the timeline and the controls don’t work as fluent as one might wish. Zoom worked by luck/accident for me. The table with events is a nice overview but viewing them was very slow.

end of test

At this point I encountered to many issues that I ended the test. I this state it is not a solution I can give a customer who just wants to use it, without dealing with complex camera setup and configuration. I ignored the poor performance in my evaluation, because I didn’t spend enough time debugging this issue to really pin-point it to the software.

We ended up using the solution from Synology which fullfilled all requirements, except it’s not open source.