A full-featured, open source, state-of-the-art video surveillance software system.
Zoneminder is a pretty solid setup for IP security cameras, and the zmninja app is really nice too. I had tried it years ago but got back to it recently with some sketchy IP cameras. I just put them in their own VLAN, no Internet access, Zoneminder does motion detection and event recording, and so far I'm quite pleased with it.
Zoneminder is best for a low-power system. In the last year or so, it got proper passthrough support so it can record video straight off the camera with zero processing. You don't get alarms or motion detection or live view, but you can record 24x7 using 2% of your CPU.
Yes! I have been running Zoneminder since 2020 with no complaints.
For first time/new users I would suggest one thing, try it in a VM first and take notes. Some of the settings take a little tweaking and when you have it all hammered out you can just follow your notes to set up your production machine. When I upgraded my server I was able to set up a brand new ZM instance with 8 cameras in about a half hour because I had my notes.
I was tired of maintaining a Windows VM specifically for Blue Iris and I wanted something I could run in my Kubernetes cluster. Zoneminder was immediately out, Frigate is all around useless, shinobi's UI is terrible, Blue Cherry has an inconsistent UI and Kerberos Agent made my camera crash. That left ISpy Agent DVR. It took a bit of work to only record when Deepstack detected someone but it's been great.
I have blue iris and half a dozen cameras. My blue iris support has expired, and because of a notifications bug I can’t get notifications anymore unless I upgrade for another year. How does zoneminder compare to blue iris and deepastack? Is it worth switching? It looks like zoneminder is free. Are there any other costs involved?
I ran ZoneMinder for years before buying a Reolink NVM and now I couldn’t be happier. I’m a huge self-host-er but unless you want to babysit it ZoneMinder is a pain to self host. I ran it in docker, I ran it on raw metal, I tried multiple plugins/configs. Nothing beat the plug and play of a Reolink NVM. I say this as someone with multiple servers and ~150TB of storage locally.
Skip the headache and buy something off the shelf for this.