moonfire-nvr VS motion

How do folks test timing-related stuff with MSW? AFAIK, MSW doesn't get along with jest.useFakeTimers. It drives me nuts; I have a bunch of disabled tests in an open-source project and at least one that is flaky because it uses real timers where I'd like to be using fake timers. [1, 2]

I've been thinking about ripping out MSW from my tests in favor of my own API-level mock for this reason. But it seems like many other folks are happy with MSW. I have to assume there's something I'm not getting. I'm a fish out of water with frontend stuff in general...

[1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/5ea5d27908f1a...

[2] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/5ea5d27908f1a...

> I wonder how hard it would be to run your own streamer pipeline or whatnot on these things?

Agree with the_biot: The actual streaming component is not too hard. If this were the biggest problem, I'd be thrilled to contribute to an open source streaming server to complement my open source NVR. [1] The driver situation is indeed a bit harder—these things don't just have mainline Linux support with v4l2 for the video input and encoder. Or open source drivers of any kind to crib from AFAIK.

The biggest problem IMHO is that there just aren't any good cameras to buy, even completely ignoring the software aspect. I want a camera that:

1. doesn't support genocide. Nothing that involves Dahua, Hikvision, or Huawei. See IPVM articles on the subject. And a lot of available cameras are relabeled Dahua/Hikvision stuff and/or use Huawei components.

2. is legal for sale / authorized for use in the US. (See the Secure Equipment Act of 2021.)

3. has good night mode performance: IR/day switch, a sensor that is at least 1/1.8", reasonable resolution (somewhere from HD to 4k).

4. has an "eyeball" or "turret" form factor rather than "bullet". The latter seems to really attract spiders, so you end up with a really nice video of a web...

5. supports PoE.

6. is weatherized (IP66 or so).

7. is reasonably priced.

If you ignore #1 and #2, there's some nice hardware out there, but I'm not willing to do that. If you ignore #3, there are a few options (GeoVision, maybe Reolink, maybe Hanwha.) If you ignore #4 and #7, there might be a couple (Axis, maybe Hanwha.) Nothing that ticks all the boxes.

Hard to get excited about investing a lot in the software when the hardware isn't there.

[1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr

saw one nvr project in rust - https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr - maybe you can find answer there

Moonfire NVR does basically that. No decoding at all. The configuration process could be smoother, but there's a decent setup guide to follow.

This is exactly what you're looking for: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr

But I would definitely avoid compiling Rust on the Raspberry Pi 3 if you can avoid it. I set up a Docker cross-compile environment for this reason.

Moonfire may be what you're looking for otherwise.

That last bit's not quite true: another option is to just use the cameras as a dumb stream source and do all the fanciness in an open source NVR. I've been slowly working on moonfire-nvr. Help welcome!

Moonfire

https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack - started working on this as a wrapper over OpenAI's endpoints for another product and it gradually became this.

Another project I worked on for my own use was a network isolated, lightweight video monitoring system. Around 5 years ago, I was looking to install a camera in our living room. I couldn't find anything I trusted that worked completely offline without some companion app pinging their servers. So I bought a basic IP camera on Amazon that supports rtsp and a raspberry pi. Created a fenced wifi network and added the camera to it.

Had an FFmpeg process read camera stream on demand and write to local buffers. Wrote a simple python server to listen for incoming connections on a different interface and stream the video on API requests. Then built an android app that talks to the python server to stream video on demand.

Also installed motion (https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion) on raspberry pi to detect motion in the video and store those snippets to local storage. With motion running, the adapter I was using wasn't delivering enough power resulting in storage occasionally unmounting and raspberry pi restarting taking the camera system offline. With motion detection disabled, the entire setup ran reliably for many years.

We used https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion for crude version of that in our office closet datacenter.

It just detected movement, sent an email with video file attached and a link to stream.

No face detect AI but this is ancient software, and minimum effort to set up

MotionEyeOS

I had a similar setup to see what my pet hedgehog was getting up to at night and I used motion to do motion detection on the stream and save videos when it happened. I think you can also set a script to run whenever motion is detected. Might be worth looking into.

I use Motion for my security camera... it only records motion if you want it to: https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion...

apt-get install ffmpeg libmariadb3 libpq5 libmicrohttpd12 wget https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/releases/download/release-4.3.2/buster_motion_4.3.2-1_arm64.deb dpkg -i buster_motion_4.3.2-1_arm64.deb

You might consider Motion. It's reliable and uses little resources. It comes with a browser UI.