No idea how many times we've hit this topic, but it always comes up, and given that it's part of my job I like to keep you guys in the loop.
Good news: I have found something that pleases me very well. Oh so very well.
http://www.bluecherrydvr.com/You may have heard of me talk about ZoneMinder before. ZoneMinder is a open source (free) bit of recording software. It's clunky, but it works. I also found it was pretty CPU intensive if you tried doing anything like motion detection and was prepared to dig for some big CPU servers to run the thing when I moved to 16 IP cameras.
And then we snagged a BlueCherry box that comes with licenses for 32 cameras, 6 TB of usable storage (RAID 5 - it's 8 TB raw over four disks), all pre-installed for $1500. Yeah, it's a refurbished Dell server, so the hardware ain't much, but it's getting me where I need to be going.
OK, so that's way outside the "DIY home security system" pricing, but hear me out.
They price the software pretty reasonably. If you want 4 cameras it's $100 for the licenses and that gets you some support. Installation is pretty easy if you know how to stand up Ubuntu (or Debian) and add in their apt repository to your sources.list file.
Basically what these guys did is take ZoneMinder, made it into a product, stripped out the GPL code eventually, made it a commercial product, and beat it with a bat of awesome for I don't know how long. The admin side of the web UI is probably 20x slicker than ZoneMinder was. Plus they built a pretty handy desktop app (Windows, OS X, and Linux) for viewing your cameras that feeds not directly off the cameras but rather off a re-feed via RTSP that their server provides. So you can mix in old coax cameras and new IP cameras of differing manufacturers and the end client program just looks to the server for the re-feed. That's slick, and not something I've ever seen before.
They are also very good on the support side. If I have a problem they're talking to me within 30 minutes usually. Granted, they don't always have the answer I want or need, but they're there. I tend to run into genuine bugs before I ask for help which means the level 1 guy (he's smart, don't get me wrong) can't do much for me but when I checked the release notes on the latest version of the server it felt pretty obvious that they were addressing my concerns. And the new version fixed my issues.
What I'm getting at is if you want a simple home security camera system it's probably worth the $100 for the software. If you have to go with coax then I'd buy the tuner cards from them because they know what they're doing. If you go with IP cameras just pick something they support. I'm on Axis M1011 and M1011W (wireless) cameras which work great but they support most darned near anything. I wouldn't recommend going with the el-cheapo Foscam stuff out there but I bet they do support it.
And because they managed to whack CPU consumption way down I bet you could go a 4 camera system on a pithy little box with a single CPU. Not an Atom, mind you, but anything with a bit of heft would do it. Grab a shuttle box of some kind, throw Ubuntu on there, slap in a couple of drives in a soft RAID array and you're in business.
It takes a LOT to impress me with software and these guys have done it. Yes, it still has warts but I'm 100% confident that they'll iron them out very quickly and then go back to beating the product with the awesome stick.
