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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.

<table> <tbody> <tr valign=top> <td><a href="screenshots/list.png"><img src="screenshots/list.png" width=360 height=345 alt="list view screenshot"></a></td> <td><a href="screenshots/live.jpg"><img src="screenshots/live.jpg" width=360 height=212 alt="live view screenshot"></a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

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 pre-1.0, with 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:

Documentation