security camera monitoring from Linux

["Tom Metro-12" <user=71@nabble.blu.org>]

 I'm looking to remotely monitor a few security cameras attached to an 
Ubuntu box via USB. Any recommendation for software to pull this off? 

I've looked at ZoneMinder (http://www.zoneminder.com/), which acts as 
the central monitoring/recording app. for analog and IP cameras. They 
say it'll work with anything that can produce an MJPEG stream or JPEG 
stills. I believe it also supports using motion detection to trigger 
recording and alarms. 

I presume it provides a web UI for remote viewing, but I haven't ran 
across that in the documentation yet. Though I'm wonder if using VLC to 
directly view the MJPEG streams might be simpler. I hoping the 
ZoneMinder web UI provides a means of reviewing the motion detection 
logs and corresponding clips. 

According to: 
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Uvc

you need to use mjpg_streamer streamer 
(http://mjpg-streamer.wiki.sourceforge.net/) to read the video stream 
from USB video sources and convert them into an MJPEG stream. It doesn't 
look like mjpg_streamer is in the Ubuntu repositories, but they do have 
a package on the project site. Anyone used this tool before? (I did 
notice that my Ubuntu box already has mjpegtools installed, but this 
seems to be more of a codec package for other tools, and doesn't provide 
a tool to read video frames and stream them over HTTP.) 

After attaching my USB video source, the kernel logs: 

Aug 12 11:04:24 mythtv kernel: [1755124.647763] usb 2-2: new full speed 
USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2 
Aug 12 11:04:24 mythtv kernel: [1755124.851684] usb 2-2: configuration 
#1 chosen from 1 choice 

As there is no mention of a /dev/video* device, I gather I still need to 
install something to get this to work...yup the UVC v4l kernel drivers: 
http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/

which don't appear to be available as a package, or event a tarred 
source release. Is building this from the svn source really the best 
option available? 

  -Tom 

-- 
Tom Metro 
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA 
"Enterprise solutions through open source." 
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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