Moonfire NVR, a security camera network video recorder
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Scott Lamb b41a6c43da shutdown better
After a frustrating search for a suitable channel to use for shutdown
(tokio::sync::Receiver and
futures::future::Shared<tokio::sync::oneshot::Receiver> didn't look
quite right) in which I rethought my life decisions, I finally just made
my own (server/base/shutdown.rs). We can easily poll it or wait for it
in async or sync contexts. Most importantly, it's convenient; not that
it really matters here, but it's also efficient.

We now do a slightly better job of propagating a "graceful" shutdown
signal, and this channel will give us tools to improve it over time.

* Shut down even when writer or syncer operations are stuck. Fixes #117
* Not done yet: streamers should instantly shut down without waiting for
  a connection attempt or frame or something. I'll probably
  implement that when removing --rtsp-library=ffmpeg. The code should be
  cleaner then.
* Not done yet: fix a couple places that sleep for up to a second when
  they could shut down immediately. I just need to do the plumbing for
  mock clocks to work.

I also implemented an immediate shutdown mode, activated by a second
signal. I think this will mitigate the streamer wait situation.
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Introduction

Moonfire NVR is an open-source security camera network video recorder, started by Scott Lamb <slamb@slamb.org>. 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, using less than 10% of the machine's total CPU.

Help wanted to make it great! Please see the contributing guide.

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 an experimental live view UI.

list view screenshot live view screenshot

There's no support yet for motion detection, no https/TLS support (you'll need a proxy server, as described here), and only a console-based (rather than web-based) configuration UI.

Moonfire NVR is currently at version 0.6.5. 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 but it is not for the faint of heart.

I hope to add features such as video analytics. In time, we can build a full-featured hobbyist-oriented multi-camera NVR that requires nothing but a cheap machine with a big hard drive. 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 4 TB drives costing about $100), so we can afford to keep many camera-months of both streams on disk.
  • off-loading on-NVR analytics to an inexpensive USB or M.2 neural network accelerator and hardware H.264 decoders.
  • taking advantage of on-camera analytics. They're often not as accurate, but they're the best way to stretch very inexpensive NVR machines.

Documentation