Some time ago I bought a few Foscam MJPEG cameras and installed them in our apartment, originally for baby monitoring, and I wanted to set up a proper security surveillance system.  I already have a Netgear ReadyNAS box, so I thought this should be easy.  However, I soon found out that video surveillance solutions from major NAS vendors (e.g., Netgear, QNap, Synology) require per-camera licenses, in the range of $50-60/camera.  That would be over $200 to enable functionality already present in the device!  Although this is already an order of magnitude cheaper than hardware from traditional NVR (network video recorder) vendors, it still felt unreasonably high. Oh, and Foscam cameras still aren’t supported by ReadyNAS Surveillance.  There used to be a KMotion port for ReadyNAS, but it disappeared around the time Netgear’s official solution came out on the market.  Since ReadyNAS is almost Debian (with customizations), I gave installing KMotion from source a shot, but after an afternoon fiddling with custom configurations as well as tweaks for the low-power Atom CPU, I gave up.

Perhaps the NVR industry is ripe for “disruption”, but I wasn’t willing to wait. Last time I did that (for car stereos) was almost three years ago… and I’m still waiting.  Luckily, an NVR is a much simpler build than a custom car stereo (this was enough for me, thank you :).  There are several low-cost hardware options and ZoneMinder is a great open-source surveillance system that was originally built to scratch an itch (the original author’s power tools were stolen from his garage, and he couldn’t find any reasonably-priced commercial surveillance solutions he liked).  Here is what I got after about a day:

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