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https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr

Moonfire NVR, a security camera network video recorder
https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr

camera ip-camera javascript nvr rtsp rust security-camera video

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Moonfire NVR, a security camera network video recorder

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README

        

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* [Introduction](#introduction)
* [Documentation](#documentation)

# Introduction

Moonfire NVR is an open-source security camera network video recorder, started
by Scott Lamb <>. It saves H.264-over-RTSP streams from
IP cameras to disk into a hybrid format: video frames in a directory on
spinning disk, other data in a SQLite3 database on flash. It can construct
`.mp4` files for arbitrary time ranges on-the-fly. It does not decode,
analyze, or re-encode video frames, so it requires little CPU. It handles six
1080p/30fps streams on a [Raspberry Pi
2](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-2-model-b/), using
less than 10% of the machine's total CPU.

**Help wanted to make it great! Please see the [contributing
guide](CONTRIBUTING.md).**

So far, the web interface is basic: a filterable list of video segments,
with support for trimming them to arbitrary time ranges. No scrub bar yet.
There's also an experimental live view UI.



list view screenshot
live view screenshot

There's no support yet for motion detection, no https/TLS support (you'll
need a proxy server, as described [here](guide/secure.md)), and only a
console-based (rather than web-based) configuration UI.

Moonfire NVR is pre-1.0, with will be no compatibility guarantees:
configuration and storage formats may change from version to version. There is
an [upgrade procedure](guide/schema.md) but it is not for the faint of heart.

I hope to add features such as video analytics. In time, we can build
a full-featured hobbyist-oriented multi-camera NVR that requires nothing but
a cheap machine with a big hard drive. There are many exciting techniques we
could use to make this possible:

* avoiding CPU-intensive H.264 encoding in favor of simply continuing to use
the camera's already-encoded video streams. Cheap IP cameras these days
provide pre-encoded H.264 streams in both "main" (full-sized) and "sub"
(lower resolution, compression quality, and/or frame rate) varieties. The
"sub" stream is more suitable for fast computer vision work as well as
remote/mobile streaming. Disk space these days is quite cheap (with 4 TB
drives costing about $100), so we can afford to keep many camera-months
of both streams on disk.
* off-loading on-NVR analytics to an inexpensive USB or M.2 neural network
accelerator and hardware H.264 decoders.
* taking advantage of on-camera analytics. They're often not as accurate, but
they're the best way to stretch very inexpensive NVR machines.

# Documentation

* [Contributing](CONTRIBUTING.md)
* [License](LICENSE.txt) —
[GPL-3.0-or-later](https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-or-later.html)
with [GPL-3.0-linking-exception](https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-linking-exception.html)
for OpenSSL.
* [Change log](CHANGELOG.md) / release notes.
* [Guides](guide/), including:
* [Installing](guide/install.md)
* [Building from source](guide/build.md)
* [Securing Moonfire NVR and exposing it to the Internet](guide/secure.md)
* [UI Development](guide/developing-ui.md)
* [Troubleshooting](guide/troubleshooting.md)
* [References](ref/), including:
* [Configuration file](ref/config.md)
* [JSON API](ref/api.md)
* [Design documents](design/)
* [Wiki](https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/wiki) has hardware
recommendations, notes on several camera models, etc. Please add more!