ZoneMinder is a free,

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software application for monitoring via

closed-circuit television Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of closed-circuit television cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place on a limited set of monitors. It differs from broadcast television in that the signa ...

- developed to run under

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

and released under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL). Users control ZoneMinder via a web-based interface. The application can use standard cameras (via a capture card,

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

FireWire IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony a ...

etc.) or IP-based camera devices. The software allows three modes of operation: * monitoring (without recording) * recording after detected movement * permanent recording The application supports multiple cameras, reviewable simultaneously. Recording starts when the application detects changes between camera frames; one can select zones within field of view that the software will ignore. ZoneMinder supports cameras compatible with ONVIF standard. However, relative difficulty of configuration is - along with limited support for other languages than English - counted among ZoneMinder's weak points. This is underlined by lack of straightforward documentation. Filip Palian reported in 2008 that ZoneMinder contained security loopholes allowing unauthorized remote control of cameras, basic authentication (for example, .htaccess on

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

) should circumvent such issues.

See also

References

External links