Recently, one of my close relative wanted to install a security plan into his house using a CCTV solution (closed circuit television aka video surveillance). We got some quotations which were clearly out of budget for us (the lowest price was 1300€, including 4 cameras, a NVR box and the setup).
My challenge was to cut the price at least by 2, including the hardware, the software and the setup. The underlying benefit is also to explore and to learn.
Key Take aways
I like starting with the take aways first so you can read further the details if interested.
- Don’t use a remote server as a NVR hardware solution. Use instead a local hardware, such as the raspberryPI one.
- Thus, a raspberryPI with a light Operating system (Raspbian Stretch Lite) will be used as a NVR (Network Video Recording) hardware solution, as Raspberry has a H264 hardware encoding/decoding capabilities.
- Shinobi is an Open Source CCTV solution that will install on that raspberry PI device and use it as a NVR software solution.
- Purchase your cameras having 2 mandatory requirements : they should be IP compliant, and should be ONVIF standards compliant. Configuring your cameras within CCTV solution will be addressed in another blog post.
