# Introduction Moonfire NVR is an open-source security camera network video recorder, started by Scott Lamb <>. It saves H.264-over-RTSP streams from IP cameras to disk into a hybrid format: video frames in a directory on spinning disk, other data in a SQLite3 database on flash. It can construct `.mp4` files for arbitrary time ranges on-the-fly. It does not decode, analyze, or re-encode video frames, so it requires little CPU. It handles six 1080p/30fps streams on a [Raspberry Pi 2](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-2-model-b/), using less than 10% of the machine's total CPU. So far, the web interface is basic: a filterable list of video segments, with support for trimming them to arbitrary time ranges. No scrub bar yet. There's also no support for motion detection, no https/SSL/TLS support (you'll need a proxy server, as described [here](guide/secure.md)), and only a console-based (rather than web-based) configuration UI. ![screenshot](screenshot.png) This is version 0.1, the initial release. Until version 1.0, there will be no compatibility guarantees: configuration and storage formats may change from version to version. There is an [upgrade procedure](guide/schema.md) but it is not for the faint of heart. I hope to add features such as salient motion detection. It's way too early to make promises, but it seems possible to build a full-featured hobbyist-oriented multi-camera NVR that requires nothing but a cheap machine with a big hard drive. I welcome help; see [Getting help and getting involved](#help) below. There are many exciting techniques we could use to make this possible: * avoiding CPU-intensive H.264 encoding in favor of simply continuing to use the camera's already-encoded video streams. Cheap IP cameras these days provide pre-encoded H.264 streams in both "main" (full-sized) and "sub" (lower resolution, compression quality, and/or frame rate) varieties. The "sub" stream is more suitable for fast computer vision work as well as remote/mobile streaming. Disk space these days is quite cheap (with 3 TB drives costing about $100), so we can afford to keep many camera-months of both streams on disk. * decoding and analyzing only select "key" video frames (see [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types)). * off-loading expensive work to a GPU. Even the Raspberry Pi has a surprisingly powerful GPU. * using [HTTP Live Streaming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming) rather than requiring custom browser plug-ins. * taking advantage of cameras' built-in motion detection. This is the most obvious way to reduce motion detection CPU. It's a last resort because these cheap cameras' proprietary algorithms are awful compared to those described on [changedetection.net](http://changedetection.net). Cameras have high false-positive and false-negative rates, are hard to experiment with (as opposed to rerunning against saved video files), and don't provide any information beyond if motion exceeded the threshold or not. # Documentation * [License](LICENSE.txt) — GPLv3 * [Building and installing](guide/install.md) * [UI Development](guide/developing-ui.md) * [Troubleshooting](guide/troubleshooting.md) * [Wiki](https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/wiki) has notes on several camera models. # Getting help and getting involved Please email the [moonfire-nvr-users](https://groups.google.com/d/forum/moonfire-nvr-users) mailing list with questions, or just to say you love/hate the software and why. You can also file bugs and feature requests on the [github issue tracker](https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/issues). I'd welcome help with testing, development (in Rust, JavaScript, and HTML), user interface/graphic design, and documentation. Please email the mailing list if interested. Pull requests are welcome, but I encourage you to discuss large changes on the mailing list or in a github issue first to save effort.