A network video recorder for multiple IP cameras using VLC.

MLUG presentation slides on electric_eye

I’ve been using Zoneminder & motion and these programs are either too large for my requirements (zoneminder) or don’t work with the cameras I own (motion). What I did notice is all my cameras work through VLC with high resolution and VLC can record.

I started with VLC doing the recording up to 0.1.0 where I changed over to using ffmpeg instead.

• ffmpeg 3.x - recording & motion detection We are using 3.x for it’s reconnect features.
• ruby 1.9.3 or above
• Linux (Tested on Debian 7, Xubuntu 14.04)

Under linux install vlc xvfb & ruby

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg ruby

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'electric_eye'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install electric_eye

Enter your cameras into the JSON config file like so

---
duration: 60
path: "/media/data/recordings"
threshold: 2
cameras:
- :name: Reception
  :url: rtsp://<user>:<passwd>@<camera's ip>/live2.sdp
- :name: Kitchen
  :url: rtsp://<user>:<passwd>@<camera's ip>/live2.sdp
- :name: Workstations
  :url: rtsp://<user>:<passwd>@<camera's ip>/live2.sdp

You should be able to view the URL through vlc before using this program.

The recordings directory will end up with these directories

/media/data/recordings/reception
/media/data/recordings/kitchen

Files will be numbered up to your wrap figure. The wrap figure determines when the recording program should start from zero again. EG: If you select you duration as 3600 seconds and a wrap figure of 168 then you get a rolling recording over a 1 week period which would be divided up into 1hr files.

reception000.mjpeg
motion-reception000.mjpeg
reception001.mjpeg
motion-reception001.mjpeg

The default is going to be 10 minute blocks, this can be overridden with the duration variable above in minutes.

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file pointing it to your ffmpeg location

export FFMPEG_BIN="/opt/ffmpeg3/bin/ffmpeg"

To compile ffmpeg 3 into there do the following

./configure --prefix=/opt/ffmpeg3
make -j4
sudo make install

Some people reboot their cameras everynight. This does not work well with electric eye at the moment. As a work around you have to stop and start electric eye in your crontab.

First make sure you add your cameras

electric_eye -a Reception <url>

Now start the daemon to start the recording process

electric_eye -s

Start with debug messages

electric_eye -s --log-level=debug

Stop all recordings

electric_eye -k

Usage in development mode

bundle exec bin/electric_eye -h

Debug mode

bundle exec bin/electric_eye -s --log-level=debug

To start the service on boot (on a linux machine) add the following

Add the following to /etc/init/electric_eye

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
# Electric Eye
#
# chkconfig:    2345 80 20
# description:  Network Video Recorder

RBENV_DIR= '/usr/local/rbenv/shims'
APP_NAME = 'electric_eye'

case ARGV.first

when 'start'
        system "su johnsmith -c \"#{RBENV_DIR}/electric_eye -s\""

when 'stop'
        system "su johnsmith -c \"#{RBENV_DIR}/electric_eye -k\""

when 'restart'
        system "su johnsmith -c \"#{RBENV_DIR}/electric_eye -k\""
        sleep 0.5
        system "su johnsmith -c \"#{RBENV_DIR}/electric_eye -s\""

end

unless %w{start stop restart}.include? ARGV.first
        puts "Usage: #{APP_NAME} {start|stop|restart}"
        exit
end

Make executable & add to startup

cd /etc/init.d
chmod +x electric_eye
update-rc.d electric_eye defaults

Replace johnsmith with your user where you have setup your camera profiles. NOTE: I cannot get it working nicely with the root user.

Optional - This was needed for versions prior to 0.1.0, now it is only a precaution as ffmpeg does clean up after itself.

Cleaning up recordings. Put the following into your /etc/crontab per recording directory.

00 19	* * *	root	/usr/bin/find <directory to recordings> -type f -mtime +<days> -exec rm {} \;

Example for cleaning up reception after 60days at 7pm everynight.

00 19	* * *	root	/usr/bin/find /media/recordings/reception -type f -mtime +60 -exec rm {} \;

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/map7/electric_eye/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature`)
3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am ‘Add some feature’`)
4. Push to the branch (`git push origin my-new-feature`)
5. Create a new Pull Request

• [X] Add more testing
• [X] Add post recording motion detection (use vlc)
• [X] Make sure we cannot add blank cameras
• [X] Create threshold as a variable
• [X] Swap over to using ffmpeg
• [X] Do post motion detection (using fmmpeg)
• [X] Add a feature to clean up old recordings using a “period” setting (ffmpeg handles this) EG: 60 day period which could be set in the config file how many days you want to keep Then just call ‘electric_eye –remove-recordings’ within crontab This would iterate over all my cameras and remove old recordings to keep a rolling set of days.
• [ ] Adjust motion detection to date format

  <yyyymmdd>-<hhmm>-<camera name>.mpeg
      

• [ ] Allow motion detection to be turned on/off (default: off)
• [ ] Threshold should be per camera or have inside & outside thresholds There is a large difference in movement between indoor office cameras and outdoor cameras. With wind and rain comes a lot of motion!