For a while I ran a box as a combo LAMP and ZoneMinder server; I ended up shutting it down as I wasn't using the LAMP server much any longer, and ZoneMinder was

For a while I ran a box as a combo LAMP and ZoneMinder server; I ended up shutting it down as I wasn't using the LAMP server much any longer, and ZoneMinder was overkill for my purposes... ...but if you've never played around with a security camera system like ZoneMinder allows for, it can be an interesting experience. Like I said, complete overkill for my home security camera system - but it would be perfect if you set it up like an appliance, on a beefy system - because it needs a lot of CPU to process frames and such - and you have a lot of cameras to work with. You can hook up virtually any kind of camera; from a simple USB webcam (heck, you could probably even get a parallel port black and white quickcam to work if you were crazy enough), to a set of cameras on a multi-input video digitizer card, to a full-on professional level PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera (with PTZ control!). It is fairly complex to set up properly; one could easily create a business around it selling turnkey camera security appliances if one wanted to, I believe - though I don't think I've seen any such business like that (unlike how there are/were tons of companies doing VOIP using custom Asterisk systems). The whole application is written (IIRC) in Python; I don't recall what it uses for the video processing (whether OpenCV or some other library). It uses multiple processes to handle everything (it isn't a monolithic system), so it is fairly robust. But as I mentioned, the more cameras/video streams you have (and the higher resolution those cameras are), the more CPU you need to process everything. I'm not sure if there is a hard limit, or a way to segregate things across multiple systems (ie - some kind of clustering?); I think you can specify a separate DB server... Anyhow - it's something different; I had it at one time running on a PII-350 with 64 Mb of RAM years ago - the last machine, IIRC, was a P4-933 with 256 Mb of RAM - and I could process a couple of streams of 640x480 color video from a couple of IP cameras (all I needed for my home system). But that was the limit for that machine. A more modern machine would probably work much better.