Setting up CCTV on Unraid pt1 Comparing the software

hi guys this is the first in a series of videos about setting up a CCTV server on an raid this part looks at the pros and cons of doing this and then compares a bunch of different CCTV solutions that we can run on one raid to see which one comes out on top sounds interesting the let's get started oh but first - all of my American friends Happy Thanksgiving [Music] right okay so CCTV now should we use our server to run our CCTV system well there are two lines of thought there firstly the answer is no you shouldn't and why is that so the people that will tell you that will tell you it's best to have things satraps and not to have all of your eggs in one basket so yes there's definitely some valid logic there because if your server goes down then so would your CCTV but that being true anything can break and so can a standalone system and if a standalone system goes down for example maybe a hard drive fails you may not notice that for a while on a standalone system however you'd be much more likely to know for problem with your server pretty much straight away and another advantage to the standalone system root is it's probably going to be easier to set it all up but I think that most of the people watching my channel don't mind putting in a little bit of effort to get something set up ok then so let's look at why we should set up a CCTV system on our server well most of us were running a home server we've probably got that powered on 24 hours a day seven days a week so I have another system that's consuming power all of the time and like I said noticing problems on your server you're probably going to deal with them straight away because you'll notice some far sooner so with that reasoning you could argue that it's going to be more reliable and the main reason for me is well it's kind of fun now we all like tinkering with our servers and this is something that really does have a useful purpose because come on some of the things we set up on our server really is quite pointless such as just setting up random VMs you know like setting up a Hannah Montana Linux VM just to see what it's like and yes actually there really is a distro called Hannah Montana Linux so with that said we've got to be grateful for the guys at lime technology who chose the name unread for their distro because it might just be a little embarrassing chatting at work and saying hey I set up a great docker container last night on my Hannah Montana server right okay so enough of the bad jokes and let's move on so let's take a moment just to stop and think about what we actually want from our system from the CCTV we definitely want three things one we want to better view our cameras from anywhere - we want our cameras to record the footage and three probably the most important one is we need our system to be reliable so yeah these three points are pretty obvious and if we're buying a standalone system that would be all we'd have to worry about but if you're watching this video then you're probably not going to buy an off-the-shelf solution or at least you're considering putting one together yourself so if we're going to be using our server to also pull CCTV duties is there anything extra that we should be thinking about well yep most definitely as well as the above we want our CCTV solution to be efficient now we don't want the CCTV to be pecking out our CPU just because it's viewing or recording footage I don't want to be watching MB or gaming only to have everything glitch because I'm hosting a CCTV system that's just a resource hog so our choice of what solution to use is very important we mainly have two routes which we can go we could use a VM to run our CCTV system and a lot of people may have a VM running something like blue iris on Windows well we could be using something like I Spy or webcam XP now that's definitely a way forward but do we really need to be running a whole dedicated VM with a whole operating system just to record some CCTV footage so our other option is to use a docker container now that's definitely going to be more lightweight than a VM so it's probably going to be more efficient so with docker what options do we have so let's have a look at the options which we can find in community applications I'm going to do a search for CCTV and that search brings us two results it brings us Shinobi and zone minder so now I'm going to expand the search and use the term surveillance okay so that brings us to extra containers mou shinai angioma so those are some different options to use to set up a CCTV system on our server and I was saying it's got to be efficient so I'm gonna run some basic tests nothing too scientific just something simple to see how much resources each solutions going to use so the server I'm going to use for these tests is one with an older four cores II on CPU and III 1240 v 2 and 16 gigs of ram so let's look at the vm solutions first the vm running them is based on the Windows 10 VM with all four cores eight threads and eight gigs of RAM so let's have a look at how much resources this VM runs on its own without running any CCTV software so when the VM is idle with nothing running we're looking at around 8 to 9% CPU usage so that will give us a baseline for the different VM solutions we're going to test so to make each test as similar as possible I'm going to be recording from for 1080p cameras now they're going to be set to record constantly unless the software doesn't allow it where it only allows recording by motion detection such as the software motion I okay so let's start off with blue iris and see how that performs ok so recording on all four cameras my CPU usage is now around somewhere between 64 and 67 percent so blue iris does seem quite resource hungry ok so now let's try I spy again this is recording for cameras and it seems a lot more efficient and it seems to be going between say maybe 26 and 30 percent so onto webcam XP now unfortunately I couldn't get any of my cameras to work with this software and to be honest I really didn't like it at all so I'm gonna miss this one out so let's move on and look at the CCTV docker solutions but first let's look at the server with nothing running just to get a baseline so the CPU load with nothing running is about 1% so now let's have a look at Shinobi running in a container again recording for cameras Wow okay that's really good the CPU load is really low between 2 and 4 percent roughly so that really is super a fish and okay so onto one probably a lot of you've heard of before zone minder let's have a look and see how that one performs again recording for cameras well this containers using a lot more resources it's fluctuating from maybe kind of 50 up to 65 percent so is own minder is quite hungry for those resources so emotion eyes up next our motion is configured to only record when it detects motion but I think at the moment most of the cameras have got something kind of moving maybe it's just leaves or something so at the moment probably all four cameras are recording but it could just be fluctuating and you can see here that the CPU overhead isn't too bad seems to be in between sixteen and eighteen percent and finally the last contender zhuoma and Zuma it seems quite efficient its CPU usage between six and eight percent okay so let's have a look at the results a bit more closely on a nice bar graph so whatever the CCTV solution we're using running it in the VM will have more of an overhead idle docker is using about one percent load and idle a VM is using eight percent so there's an extra seven percent straight away so basically just for that reason I won't run CCTV in a VM I think just using Windows on its own for the sole purpose of running CCTV I just don't think it's worth it but maybe if you had some other software that you can only run in a VM as well then it might be worth running them side by side in the same VM and if I was running my CCTV system in a Windows VM and I'd definitely choose I spy and not only because it's much more efficient and using less CPU resources also because it's free and because it's open-source but running a CCTV system in a docker container is I think a much better idea so looking at the efficiency results here for the containers so minder for me is just to resource-hungry so I wouldn't use it sorry zone minder now motion I I did actually really quite like this it was very easy to set up and use and makes a good basic CCTV system but it's lacking a lot of features and it's still using more resources than both si OMA and shinobi so now Z OMA well it's definitely efficient and it is really decent software but it needs a paid license and I thought their licensing seemed very complicated so for me the winner hands down is shinobi not only in my testing was only using three percent of my total CPU usage but it's also open source and it's free to use so it's shinobi which I'll go through how to set up in the third part of this series but before that in the next part part 2 we'll look at some other very important things we'll be looking at the various different hardware that you can use but also we're going to be looking at how to make sure that hardware's secure we need to make sure that the CCTV system is secure on our network because there are more ways and you may first think that CCTV can be a security risk on your network and now I'm not just talking about cheap Chinese cameras being a risk so that's part two and this is the end of part one but before I wrap this video up I want to give a huge thanks to all of you people out there that support me all of my patrons and supporters thank you so much guys I just wouldn't be able to make these videos without your help and if you'd like to join those great bunch of people then please see the links in the description below and as I always are asked if you did like this video just please take a moment to hit the like button and share it with anyone who you think might find it useful well it's time for me to go now so whatever you're up to for the rest of the day I hope it's good and I'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 47,819

Keywords: cctv installation, cctv unraid, cctv docker, how to install cctv, cctv server, shinobi, blue iris, ispy, motioneye, xeoma, zone minder, spaceinvaderone, spaceinvader one, limetechnology, lime tech, cctv on unraid, shinobi unraid, unraid, home server, ipcamera

Id: Alvt8nkdlqg

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/spaceinvaderone]

Hey Guys. Here is a video which is the first in a series about setting up a CCTV son your Unraid server.

Part two will be uploaded tomorrow (friday) and the final part on saturday.

Hope you find it useful :)

[u/Stan464]

I'm currently using Blueiris in a Windows 10 VM.

This is then sending emails on Motion, and auto uploading to a primary Google Drive, that then gets Uploaded to another Google Drive via Duplicacy every 2 hours, for long term archiving.

[u/rushdensturgeo]

I'm running Blue Iris in a W10 VM, I passed through the onboard Intel 630 graphics and enabled quicksync within Blue Iris, the VM is pinned to two cores on my i5-8400. With a single camera I'm using on average 6% cpu within the VM.

[u/xxhonkeyxx]

Yes! this is exactly what I wanted. Thank you so much. Haven’t watched it yet but hoping there is some way to remote in via an app on your phone included at some point.

[u/funko_whats_poppin]

I'm not sure this is an accurate/fair comparison of the various solutions. Some of these are doing object detection by default, no? The Shinobi documentation warns "Object Detection uses a lot of CPU Power. " There is a HUGE difference between a simple DVR and active person/object detection. Even with this feature there might be a huge difference in the quality of detection. Do I want to get notified every time the wind blows, or only when a PERSON is detected? Can you set up "zones" to only sense detection in certain parts of the frame (such as blocking out a public road/sidewalk)? All of these things are going to be resource intensive, and you probably want to offload it to a gpu. That would probably be a LOT easier to set up in a VM, if it's possible at all in a docker image.

[u/seredin]

It's like you monitor my searches... Perfect! Can't wait for pts n+1 and beyond.

[u/MCMaestro]

I liked shinobi, however my main issue with it for me was that using IP cams outputting an MJPEG stream, shinobi was unable to encode the stream, which made for far too large video files, and I need to keep a month's worth of continuous recordings. No idea why it didn't work. My server is pretty old hardware, so this is possibly a cause, I tried a lot of things, but alas, no luck.

Interestingly I switched over to Zoneminder and don't have issues with CPU usage at all. I like it a lot, and it's pretty versatile, but complex and a bit confusing at first, and solved my issues with file sizes, and doesn't butcher the video quality.

I looked into most of the solutions here, and they all have their ups and downs, but most of the paid / licensed software seemed very expensive IMO.

[u/phonoflux]

I'm running unifi video with 4 cameras (naturally, unifi cameras too) all set to record on motion if anyone wants details on that.

[u/Sunsparc]

This was actually fairly easy to set up though I'm interested in Part 3 to see if I can fine tune anything.

I have two IP cameras, one 720p and one 1080p. Server is averaging 7% load.