This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with Isaac Connor about Zoneminder! That’s the project that’s working to store and deliver all the bits from security cameras — but the CCTV world has changed a lot since Zoneminder first started, over 20 years ago. The project is working hard to keep up, with machine learning object detection, WebRTC, and more. Isaac talks a bit about developer burnout, and a case or two over the years where an aggressive contributor seems suspicious in retrospect. And when is the next stable version of Zoneminder coming out, anyway?
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord? Have someone you’d like use to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Next week we’re taping the show on Tuesday, and looking for a guest!
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
CCTV is one of the few things I built myself, and don’t regret… I really like the idea of zoneminder… but the setup seems pretty involved.
Does it still need a separate database? Does the WebRTC stuff work on LAN without a domain name or self signed certificate setup?
I found it better to find a preexisting image and ran it under a VM.
If you just apt install zoneminder it pretty much works nowadays. A far cry from how it used to be. I love zoneminder, I love the progress it’s made over the last 12years I’ve been using it. A superb and often overlooked project due to the fairly steep initial learning curve. If anyone reading this contributes.. thank you!
I know this post is a bit dated, but I took on a 50-camera CCTV overhaul in early 2025 and settled on ZoneMinder 1.39 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. A few notes from the journey:
Performance: The initial setup hit CPU and memory bottlenecks pretty fast. The majority of our cameras are 4K. I resolved this by using passthrough recording and using h.265, relying on the individual processing capabilities of each camera. I did consider adding a GPU to our Dell PowerEdge server for decode offload, but ultimately didn’t end up needing to.
Timestamps: Drift was a real headache. As mentioned in the podcast, passthrough recording does not support timestamps since no encoding happens. Deployed a local NTP server on the same host as ZoneMinder — most modern cameras support NTP, which resolved it cleanly. Great mention in the podcast. Should have listened to this a couple years ago!
Memory: The recent memory optimization patches have made a huge difference. I was running tight on 64 GB; usage is now roughly half. That’s especially welcome given current memory pricing pressures from the AI boom.
Overall, a solid platform with clear momentum and active development! I’m genuinely excited to see where ZoneMinder goes from here.