Distributed CCTV monitoring and recording on RPi.

pimonitor is a modular CCTV solution which allows high-quality video to be quickly transported away from cameras and stored on dedicated recorders or viewed on monitors. The system is specifically designed to be run on the low-power and low-cost Raspberrry Pi, making full use of the GPU for high-quality video recording encoded in h264. The configuration is flexible so your system may for example include multiple cameras or monitors, or omit recording if you like. A complete system of camera, recorder and monitor can be put together for around £100.

The recommended video quality settings are 1920x1080 resolution at 15 fps with bitrate at 1Mbit/s which gives a very clear recording and easily allows a month of footage to fit on cheap hard-drives.

• picamera - Camera module only
• pyzmq - Data transport
• wxPython - Monitor module only
• ffmpeg - Recorder module only (Raspberry Pi build instructions)

In order to run the camera feed as a daemon (which will automatically start on boot), we need to deploy the source and then configure init.d. The below steps can also be done for pimonitorrec, which is the recording daemon setup.

Download and extract the source:

cd /usr/local/bin/pimonitor
tar xvf pimonitor-0.1.tar.gz

Link the camera daemon script in init.d:

cd /etc/init.d
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/pimonitor/daemon/pimonitorcam.sh pimonitorcam

Test the setup:

sudo /etc/init.d/pimonitorcam start
sudo /etc/init.d/pimonitorcam status
sudo /etc/init.d/pimonitorcam stop

Update rc.d to configure restart on boot.

sudo update-rc.d pimonitorcam defaults

Released under GPLv2, see LICENSE for details.

Copyright (C) 2015 Adam King