Hello,
I am a recovering Dropcam user that got fed up with Nest/Google and bought a few Foscam 9831P network cameras so please cut me a little slack and don’t tear my head off for noob questions I am trying to have my cake and eat it too, so I have stumbled through Zoneminder, Blueiris, and now am looking at Netcam Studio.
I am both Winders and *nix literate and have my own Compaq DL380 server running Vmware ESXi with 2 physical procs with quad cores, Hyperthreaded, and 24GB of memory. I also have a Synology DS 1511 NAS array. I also have two Panasonic BB-HCM381A netcams along with (3) Foscam 9831P cams.
I would LIKE to set up a Network Video Recorder/system using the Foscam’s (all indoors) and the Panasonic cams (1 outdoor, 1 indoor), with audio and motion alerts to my cell phone (either email or txt, with pic or links to video). I would also like to be able to view video streams (live and recorded) on my desktop, tablet, and cell phone. I would also like to leverage either my external hosted site (godaddy), or maybe something like Google Drive or Dropsync, to have my videos uploaded and away from my home computers in case of bad things (or people). I am not averse to using the native Foscam or Panasonic software to directly connect to the cameras for live viewing, and use the NVR software for looking back in time.
The Foscams looked easy enough to set up with Netcam Server but I’m curious about the benefits of RTSP and ONVIF, if there are any, vs. the default of JPEG. Can one of you more informed members give me a little schooling on why I should use one or the other (or even IF I can), and maybe enlighten me as to whether or not I can accomplish all the things I’m looking for with this product? Thanks very much for your time and patience.
JPEG vs RTSP should provide noticable differences:
JPEG is slower but can be higher quality depending on cameras
RTSP / MPEG4 offers faster frame rate and may support audio or offer higher resolutions. It however may be more cpu intensive or have delays
ONVIF is not comparable since it has nothing to do with this. ONVIF just allows devices to be detected automatically by softwares or other devices running on the same network.
@Admin. A follow up question to this. I have 15 cams and the workload on the cpu is very often around 95% and sometimes 100% which results in problems with time jumps in the video. All the cams use rtrsp/h.264 which from above is rather cpu intensive. 8 cams are HD, Megapixel cams with only h.264, but 7 of the cams have also MJPEG. Would it lover the cpu load to move from h.264 to MJPEG for these cams? I assume that the network traffic will increase? If so that is no problem since I am running everything on a Gbit backbone.
Yes, moving some cameras to MJPEG will probably help in term of CPU but then it also depends what you do with the streams.
If it’s just to monitor remotely then the camera are going to sleep when not in use and should use almost no CPU. On the other end, if there is Motion Detection or Recording on those cameras, it means that they are constantly on and in use and here it starts to be very intensive since both MD and recording also additionally use resources.
Thanks for reply ;). All the cameras use MD and some of the HD cams sees the same area, but from different angels and therefore MD is triggered for several cameras at the same time which result in a high cpu load. I moved from h264 to MPEG, but I do not see any significant change in cpu load. Under Recording Settings there are parameters that can be changed. Which parameter affects the cpu load most?
I am trying to have my cake and eat it too, so I have stumbled through Zoneminder, Blueiris, and now am looking at Netcam Studio.