There are ways to configure Shinobi so that you don’t need ffmpeg to record the main stream — you just write it to disk and save it.

You would need ffmpeg only if you’re going to do motion sensing, and the recommended way of doing that is to run it on a separate stream that is lower resolution and lower frame rate, which you can the monitor and take actions on the main stream for that camera based on what you detect in the lower bandwidth stream.

I agree that you don’t want to do a lot of ffmpeg processing all over the place.

The problem with offloading that to the camera is that onvif doesn't seem to have a standard way to report this. I only need motion detection on one cam so it wasn't an issue.

But good point, I wonder how Kerberos does this

It doesn't use the builtin ONVIF motion detection but instead processes every keyframe and does motion detection between the keyframes. So not every frame is being decoded to process, but enough to perform motion capture.

There's some interesting work w.r.t motion detection that doesn't actually require decoding the packets but rather looks at the motion vectors to estimate motion. That would save up a lot of resources..

> motion detection that doesn't actually require decoding the packets but rather looks at the motion vectors to estimate motion.

There's a very cool package for the Raspberry Pi that does this: https://github.com/billw2/pikrellcam

ive also spent entirely way too much time trying to get shinobi and zoneminder to work and had to give up.

xeoma is paid but runs in docker on linux just fine