Experience with Raspberry pi and Amcrest IP2M-841B

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Leandro Silva

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Oct 24, 2020, 6:49:31 PM10/24/20
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Hey all, sharing my experience in getting moonfire-nvr up, running, and recording.

First and foremost, kudos Scott! The documentation provided is simply outstanding, I love that it provides way more than just "hey here's a NVR software", the design behind the project, the API, database, time, etc. that is great, I found those details extremely valuable.

Now to my experience in getting it to work:

Setup details:
Compute: Raspberry pi4 8GB
Storage: 16GB SD card (much less than ideal, but this was a for a setup test :) )
OS: Raspbian GNU/Linux version 10
Kernel: 5.4.51-v7l+
Camera: 1 x Amcrest IP2M-841B

I followed the guide/install[1] instructions and then opted to continue with the scripted installation[2].

The process took a while (<2 hours, I'll time it better next time), mostly due to the long time for the raspberry pi to compile things, during that time I was catching up with the docs.

The scripts (scripts/setup-ubuntu.sh, scripts/build.sh, scripts/install.sh) worked like a charm, fire and forget style, no glitches and the install came out successful, and then I added the camera through moonfire-nvr config.

The console-based config is way superior than many NVRs UI out there, the test capability right there when setting the camera config is awesome.

Being able to watch the recording without the need of plugins and such is awesome.

Suggestions:

If that's ok I'd like to include my camera details to camera's wiki[3], hopefully that'll help others with the same camera down the road, or perhaps we can make such configs available in a modular config, I also have other LaView cameras which I'll be testing next.

On the installation instructions:
    - An overall summary describing the main steps one will need to go through to get from 0 to 100 would help give an idea of what to expect in a concise fashion.
    - Add specific sections for the install, eg: raspberry pi, OSX, I think this will help end users focus better, also to add any specific instructions, caveats that aren't relevant to all

Live streaming with no recording:
    - I didn't get this to work, after adding the main and sub RTSP streams nothing showed up in the WEB UI, only after I set them to record I was able to see the images. I may have missed something but I didn't find that clear in the docs, I'll have another look and report back.

All and all, my experience was positive and I'm planning to spend more time with moonfire-nvr, testing and migrating my existing laview setup over to it.

Scott Lamb

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Jan 21, 2021, 5:46:55 PM1/21/21
to Leandro Silva, moonfire-nvr-users
My apologies for the months-long delay in responding! I'm embarrassed to say I've been pretty terrible about communication the last several months. I must have marked your message as read when not paying much attention then not noticed it again until I was preparing to send an announcement to this list today...

On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 3:49 PM Leandro Silva <ldfs...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey all, sharing my experience in getting moonfire-nvr up, running, and recording.

First and foremost, kudos Scott! The documentation provided is simply outstanding, I love that it provides way more than just "hey here's a NVR software", the design behind the project, the API, database, time, etc. that is great, I found those details extremely valuable.

Thank you!
 

Now to my experience in getting it to work:

Setup details:
Compute: Raspberry pi4 8GB
Storage: 16GB SD card (much less than ideal, but this was a for a setup test :) )
OS: Raspbian GNU/Linux version 10
Kernel: 5.4.51-v7l+
Camera: 1 x Amcrest IP2M-841B

I followed the guide/install[1] instructions and then opted to continue with the scripted installation[2].

The process took a while (<2 hours, I'll time it better next time), mostly due to the long time for the raspberry pi to compile things, during that time I was catching up with the docs.

Good news: I'm working today on making pre-built Docker images so people can give the project a spin without such a long initial process. This also means that I can relax the hardware recommendations, which suggested 4+GiB of RAM for compiling. Even a 1 GiB machine is enough to run a pre-built binary.


The scripts (scripts/setup-ubuntu.sh, scripts/build.sh, scripts/install.sh) worked like a charm, fire and forget style, no glitches and the install came out successful, and then I added the camera through moonfire-nvr config.

The console-based config is way superior than many NVRs UI out there, the test capability right there when setting the camera config is awesome.

Great!

I eventually want to do a web-based config UI, which I hope will be even better. When that happens, please let me know if I'm wrong and it loses what you like about the console-based UI. I'll certainly keep the test capability, and I'd like to improve it by including an image from the camera.
 

Being able to watch the recording without the need of plugins and such is awesome.

Suggestions:

If that's ok I'd like to include my camera details to camera's wiki[3], hopefully that'll help others with the same camera down the road, or perhaps we can make such configs available in a modular config, I also have other LaView cameras which I'll be testing next.

Absolutely! Anyone is welcome and encouraged to add these kinds of details to the wiki.

Eventually I'd like to have the RTSP URLs autodetected via ONVIF, which I imagine will be even slicker than the modular config you mentioned, but the Rust ONVIF library isn't in good enough shape for that today.
 
On the installation instructions:
    - An overall summary describing the main steps one will need to go through to get from 0 to 100 would help give an idea of what to expect in a concise fashion.
    - Add specific sections for the install, eg: raspberry pi, OSX, I think this will help end users focus better, also to add any specific instructions, caveats that aren't relevant to all

I'm in the process of rewriting them for Docker. I think the new instructions will be closer to what you're suggesting in a couple ways:
  • More concise: the main install doc will skip building from source.
  • Platform variations: the Docker instructions should work on most systems without any changes. I expect only developers will want anything different. I'm adding a little about my macOS setup to the build instructions for developers.
I'll likely push them today, and I'll welcome feedback.

Live streaming with no recording:
    - I didn't get this to work, after adding the main and sub RTSP streams nothing showed up in the WEB UI, only after I set them to record I was able to see the images. I may have missed something but I didn't find that clear in the docs, I'll have another look and report back.

This isn't supported today in a couple ways:
  • The UI code doesn't support live streaming per se. You can click on a video that goes right to the moment you loaded the page, but it won't go beyond that. The server side genuinely supports live streaming, and I have an experimental Javascript live view UI to match it, but it's not of a quality I wanted to publish. I want to address this as I rewrite the UI.
  • The server doesn't have any concept of streaming without recording. It'd require restructuring some code. My own setup is basically a pack-rat approach of recording everything so I haven't prioritized it. Is this something you care about?
All and all, my experience was positive and I'm planning to spend more time with moonfire-nvr, testing and migrating my existing laview setup over to it.

I hope my long delay in replying hasn't dissuaded you! My apologies again.
 
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