I’d be interested in more details of your setup. It sounds like it might be a good approach for something I’m planning to setup in my garden to capture the wildlife. I’d like to use motion detection and megadetector to analyse the footage. Currently trying to find some half decent cameras to use at a reasonable price.
Not the original poster, but I recommend zoneminder(open source) software. I do the same as the parent. I have an old cpu in a server that does motion detection on multiple h264 HD streams and only once (zone based) motion is detected it feeds it into a SSDLite_MobileDet object detection running on a pcie edge TPU (a cheap Google made AI accelerator). Same can be done with no accelerator, but I plan on adding many more cameras.
(Zmeventnotification add on is used for edgetpu stuff.)
Important things to note. Streams are recorded at 30fps,but motion detection runs at only 5fps as I found it better for slow moving objects. Also be prepared for the motion detection to run horribly until you tune it in, but although many more user friendly software packages exist I recommend zoneminder, because no other give so much control over motion detection parameters. I have one camera that looks at a 100m long field with multiple bushes and trees moving in the wind. It needs to be less sensitive for nearby stuff(bottom of the frame) and a lot more for far away. It has to exclude rain, snow, switches to IR etc. Only ZM allows me to tweak it properly and now that I did it runs with no false positives for days.
I wish zoneminder's setup was better - it's frankly abysmal. https://www.how2shout.com/linux/how-to-install-zoneminder-on... - and this may not even be up to date. The official docs are no help, only covering up to 18.04, and not being functional. There are docker images, but they're deprecated/unsupported. This may all have been de rigeur when zoneminder was first being created (in 2002!) but expecting this level of hackery to set up an application in 2023 is somewhat taking the piss. The UI isn't that much better - it's the kind of application sysadmins would build for each other, reminding me a lot of a typical router admin app.
Indeed it is true, I hated it when I was setting it up, but I love how it works now... So, I still recommend it, but only to people that don't mind looking at code if things don't work.
Code is here(Specifically under src/thirdparty/iot_devices/NVRChannel).
Basically I stream from RTSP cameras into GStreamer. I have GStreamer constantly convert to MPEG-TS(A wonderful format because the fixed size chunks make stream streaming easy) and output on a named pipe, plus output the keyframes to ramdisk files.
The TS stream I output via a web socket and use a JS player to decode that(See kaithem/data/modules/Beholder for the player code).
But I also output the video to files in the ramdisk continually and keep the last few segments. When record is triggered, I copy all the existing segments over(To catch things before record started), start copying any new ones and start creating an HLS playlist file. When you go to play a file in the web UI, I use an HLS player directly.
This allows playback while a session is still being recorded, and future metadata stuff in the file, and lets me use .ts for everything.
Keyframes go into a motion algorithm that uses PIL to perform an erosion operation and remove small bits of noise, taking into account real motion will be connected pixels. If motion is seen, tflite-runtime runs the Efficientdet model. This is probably the weakest part of the system, since I only look at keyframes and the model is not very accurate I occasionally miss things.
The results get postprocessed because sometimes the model sees things that aren't there. Definitely could use better modeling.
The motion estimator value is exposed as a tag point for other automation triggers in realtime.
I'm using Amcrest at the moment but they have some big ethical problems last I heard, so I'd probably go with TP Link Tapo if they still have RTSP next time.
I haven't used this Xserver, but I've used most (all?) of the free Xservers for Windows over time.
As background Windows is my preferred desktop environment for about the last ten years[1], but I do most of my "real work" on FreeBSD or Linux; having an Xserver on windows means I can do graphical work and have it mostly work.
Utilitywise, I can do things like running an image viewer to see what pictures I have in a directory.
I run mythtv; most of the administration can be done through the TV facing interface or the web interface, but some things need to be done with mythtv-setup; it runs terribly over remote X (for no good reason), but at least it runs.
I was writing a terrible NES emulator for fun, having an Xserver meant I could write it where I'm comfortable writing software, and display it where I'm comfortable with a desktop.
I'm writing a terrible operating system, which I run with QEMU for the time being; the VGA console is an X window (I support serial console and it's better than VGA, but I like to keep an eye on the VGA, because I'd like to run it on some of my home systems, and they don't all have serial ports).
[1] Although Microsoft seems to be trying to push people away again, running on the default platform has a lot of benefits.
What benefits do you see from running windows? I really see none as a software dev and os enthusiast. The only reason I kept windows so long was for a game that I stopped playing 2 years ago, and the only reason I have to use it now is because the company I currently work in has made us use it. WSL makes me embarrassed to show my work colleague how good linux/vim/tmux really is (but that might be because the laptop's 8gb is almost totally used up by invisible processes (whereas the wsl portion uses around 500mb!))
Well, you list one of the benefits of running Windows, you can keep working at your company :p. Many companies don't allow running Linux natively. For example, because Office and Outlook are considered mandatory tools. There is other software, which is only available on Windows or the Mac. Also, it is still not a trivial thing to buy a random laptop and get full hardware support, especially with very new hardware. Not even to mention NVidia...
As a consequence, Mac+VMware is my currently preferred way of running Linux, and Windows+WSL is an increasingly attractive alternative to this.
In some business sectors I see increasing demand for bottom-up-open-stack, going as far as inquiring about "Open-Firmware-no-BLOB" computing devices for all important tasks, including network and domain control, where "legacy client application systems like Windows/Outlook/Office" are relegated to isolated TS-Servers, and are being replaced by glorified thin-clients, with a local browser, media-decoder, and RDP-RemoteApp-client, all running open stack. Currently the problem here is the availability of ARM system with user-configurable TrustZone support.
But O.K., I admit, we also have a lot businesses wanting less paranoid data security practices for the sake of convenience, or other legacy Apps/Hardware.
I get to use the most tested version of all the cross platform software. Things that work for others, usually works for me. I can buy software off the shelf (games, TurboTax, whatever --- if they sell it at the store, it will run on Windows, unless I'm in the wrong store). Most desktop oriented open source is targetted towards Windows, unless it's specifically Mac focused.
When I was getting tired of my laptop running Linux was right around the release of Windows 7, which was a very nice release. I'm not sure I'll stick around with Windows 10, but at least for now, things mostly work, and I fight less with my computer than before.
There are lots of professional software that only runs on Windows. I don't understand why you can't run windows programs/OS and also still be an open source advocate/fan/user?
It's always bemuses me to see some Linux developers talk like there is literally no other option, and that all 'real' development is done on Linux.
Meanwhile, in the Real World(tm), something like 80% of all software is developed for Windows or other non-Linux operating systems.
Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell.
I have the same reaction when I see some documentation with instructions on "how to set up Kerberos support" that doesn't even mention Active Directory. It's as if the authors came from some alternate reality, a parallel Earth where Windows Server isn't quite literally 99.9% of all deployed Kerberos authentication systems.
I'm a consultant that gets to visit many different types of organisations, big and small, many with on-site or outsourced development teams. Almost all of them use Windows, develop in C#, VB, or Java and deploy on IIS or various Java platforms, but still on Windows. There are a handful that use the LAMP stack or WordPress, but these are few and far between.
Try Visual Studio and C#, focusing on its strengths like the "async" keyword. Try writing a little web app using the latest .NET Core and MS SQL Server 2019. Try adding some ColumnStore indexes on your data and point PowerBI at it. The performance will blow your mind.
PS: All of the above are free, and/or free for developers:
Yes, the "desktop" is basically Windows with some traces of Macs :). For server-like systems, Linux has pretty much "won" though. Which probably is the reason why MS is working on WSL. There are also a lot of GUI applications, which run mostly on Linux because their work domain fits in a server-like setup - and be it even for data protection reasons where the applications are running on a server cluster accessed by a remote protocol like Citrix.
I use (free) equivalents of this software to view the GUIs of Linux applications running on workstations/servers on my desktop PC running Windows 10 (essentially a thin client here). Works great.
love the site design, can I ask what you are using to build the front/backend? Love the colours and the gradient used in the background, how is this generated? Thanks
Sure thing man! Frontend is all Backbone.js hooked up to a Rails API for the backend. We use MongoDB with Mongoid and LESS for CSS with the old bootstrap.less (which later became Twitter Bootstrap). As for the background I could of used a gradient but its just an image made with photoshop.
My understanding is that the team at Digital Domain (pirates of the caribbean, Jeff Bridges in Tron) modeled the body, and then used mo-cap on an actor who did the "performance".
