Digital Surveilance with Zoneminder 1.23

After several time our church congregation got stolen, we decide to upgrade our CCTV - yes we've been using the CCTV, but the quality is very poor (we seen the theft but the picture quality is very poor and the way to retrieve the recording isn't very comfortable - we've to search every single frame and there's no other way to skip it). Then we decide to upgrade the CCTV using computerize system which we find out will be doing more good for us.

My choice drop to Zoneminder, the fact of it being open source and it ran on LINUX also!!! has been always makes me believe we're not going wrong direction. As you guys know, we are non-profit organization and our budget come from the congregation, thats why we've to consider well every penny we spent and mostly because it ran on Linux which have been famous because of it's stability and robustness.

The hardware we choose this time is a set of computer (motherboard with onboard graphic card should be enough as we're going to install a server) and a DVR card - we choose Kodicom KMC-8800 8 channel DVR card.
Here is the list of supported hardware by Zoneminder

This time i choose Ubuntu 9.04 LAMP 32bit - Jaunty Jackalope as our base system. I'm not going to tell you guys about how to install it because the installation is pretty straight forward and well documented on internet. After the installation - make sure you guys give your server a static address, and change the repository to the local one (choose the closest one to you guys).

Once again!!! make sure you guys choose to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, mysql, PHP)!!!!

After that as usually, do some package update "sudo apt-get update" and the the upgrade "sudo apt-get upgrade" - install webmin to help us configure our system.

Now we're going to the install the zoneminder, installation is pretty straight forward also - we're going to make our life easier by installing it from debian repository "sudo apt-get install zoneminder" and if it asking for dependency fire up some command "sudo apt-get install -f" and try install the zoneminder again with "sudo apt-get install zoneminder".

After the installation progress is finish, try to link Apache with Zoneminder

"sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zoneminder.conf" and the reload apache "/etc/init.d/apache force-reload"

Notes :

• For Kodicom KMC-8800 we've to make bttv.conf file on /etc/modprobe.d/ and write down
  

     options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1
     options bttv gbuffers=16 card=102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102 radio=0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 tuner=4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4 chroma_agc=1 combfilter=2 full_luma_range=1 coring=1 autoload=0

   for 1 card - The 8 inputs are from /dev/video0 channel 0 to /dev/video7 channel 0, and

     options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1
     options bttv gbuffers=16 card=102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102,102 radio=0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 tuner=4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4 chroma_agc=1 combfilter=2 full_luma_range=1 coring=1 autoload=0

   for 2 card - The 16 inputs are from /dev/video0 channel 0 to /dev/video15
   channel 0.
   At this time it appears its not possible to install more than 2 cards of this card in the same computer, the computer will detect no more than 16 BT878 chips.