Episode 780 transcript

FLOSS-780

Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, Episode 780, recorded on Tuesday, April 23rd. Zone Minder! Better call Randall.

Hey, this week Aaron joins me and we sit down with Isaac Connor to talk about Zone Minder. We cover what's happened in that project in the last few years, why you might want to upgrade to Bleeding Edge, where AI actually makes sense, and more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Hey, it's time for Floss Weekly. That's a show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we've got, we've got Aaron. We've got the, uh, the, the Retro Geek. I don't know, the Retro Hack Shack's what the YouTube channel is, but you're not the Hack Shack. What do you go by on the channel there?

Is it just Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah, just Aaron. It's fine. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I mean, there are different, in different forums, I am known as, uh, under different names, but Yeah on the channel. I just go by Aaron for sure.

Jonathan: Okay, you need some Retro styled moniker to go with that just just for the flair of it.

Aaron: Yeah I know I've also been trying to think of who how to describe my audience I'd like to give my audience a name on the channel, you know GPT to help with some some nice nicknames for my community and I think it came up with something like the The shack hackers like to reverse it, you know, the shack hackers and I kind of like that But my wife was like, I don't like that.

So I don't know. I'm still thinking about it I'm gonna ask the community for help.

Jonathan: Yeah, throw it out there and see if they came up with good ideas And that'll be fun. Yeah. Well, so today we've got uh, we've got a neat guest somebody I've So full disclosure, I've actually made a little bit of money off of this project.

I've put together a server and sent it out that is running Zoneminder, which is what we're talking about today. And we've got, we've got the man himself, Isaac Connor, or Icon, as I first, it's, it's funny when you meet someone online and you get to know their handle before you find out their name, there's always this weird dichotomy in your brain.

Like, he's, it's Icon. Oh, no, it's Isaac. That's actually the same person.

Aaron: Yep, that happens all the time for me when I meet people in person. It's like, yes. Oh, you're that person online. Oh Now I know

Jonathan: Never met you before. Yeah And then and then there's the fun of you don't look like how I imagined you looking based on the way you type

So Aaron, you, you kind of let, uh, you kind of let slip before the show. You, uh, you're an insider too. See, I, I was hoping Aaron would be the, the uninformed one that could ask the dumb questions, but you're not going to be able to today. You, you have a zone minder install yourself.

Aaron: Yeah, I do. And I really, really enjoy it.

So I mean, I'm not an expert in it, right? I just hook it up to get my recordings. Um, you know, my use case is, is pretty simple. Uh, where should I go into what the use cases and why I started with it real quick, or do you want to bring in Isaac first? Let's bring

Jonathan: in Isaac. And then I do want to get your thoughts because I think it would be fun to get kind of a, some live feedback, what works, what doesn't work and what the pain points are.

So let's go ahead and bring. Isaac onto the show. Welcome, sir. We sure appreciate you being here. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for stepping in kind of last minute. We didn't have a guest today. And so a couple of days ago, I got ahold of Isaac privately. I'm like, Hey, You're, you're on. You told me you'd be on anytime.

Well, it's, this is the time.

Isaac: Not a problem. Always a pleasure.

Jonathan: Yeah. So let's, let's start with kind of the 30, 000 foot view as we are want to do. And let's let Isaac take that and just kind of give us the quick background of what ZoneMinder is and what it's for. And then we will kick it over to Aaron and kind of get his, uh, his take on what he's using it for.

Isaac: Okay, well, uh, right off the bat, it is what we call a VMS or a CCTV VMS, which is a video management system. It's possibly one of the oldest ones in existence. Um, we actually just, I don't know, I didn't celebrate, but we made a point of mentioning that it's over 20 years old in terms of, uh, well, Git history and SVN history before that.

Um, it was, uh, originally started by a guy named Philip Coombs, who is still alive and well out there, but, you know, lost interest 10 years or more ago and was gracious enough to hand it over to a few guys, one of whom was me, to continue maintaining it. Um, and so that's about 10 years ago, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

Um, and so it's, uh, it's a, Being a free and open source, uh, package, it has all of the issues that they all have, right? Um, people come along to add the feature they want and don't document it. And that is left to someone else to maintain and all that sort of thing. And, um, but over the years, enough people have contributed and, um, You know, over the last 10 years, I've sort of taken a more commercial approach to it, um, making it fit my needs, but also trying to do some polish around it and make it, it's actually a serious contender for a proper enterprise grade commercial VMS.

Aaron: Yeah, for sure. Um, how, how much changed with a project that old? I always wonder like. How active is the, is the project right now? Are there any major releases coming out or is it pretty much all just minor tweaks?

Isaac: Um, It's been several years since the 1. 36 stable release series, and I've been doing a lot of work.

Not just me. When I say me, I'm going to call that the royal me. Um, you know, all the guys contributed to it, but really, most of the bulk of the work is me. Um, a lot has changed, and the world of video capture and the codecs, and even just keeping up with MPEG library API deprecations is a massive amount of work.

Um, so if you look in the sort of the nitty gritty, Yeah, not that much has changed, um, but then if you pull back a little bit, you look through the commits, you're like, oh, wow, um, you know, a recent example, uh, you know, we've got a contributor who, you know, I've having a look at, um, JPEG encoding, because for viewing, that's what we do a lot of, right, because, you know, the browser still doesn't support H.

265, so we end up re encoding the JPEG to watch in the browser. And like we're trying to switch over to the FFmpeg libraries to do that because we're at the moment where it's this 20 year old code. It's using libjpeg turbo. And, you know, we can't take advantage of any hardware acceleration for that. And it's, it's complicated code.

It's old because FFmpeg wasn't good 10 years ago. You know, um. So I'd say there's a lot of change. A lot of UI changes to make things nicer. Um, those are controversial. People always want simple. And then they want this button that does this thing. So we end up with a lot of buttons. But I think there's been a lot of polish.

And there's certainly been a lot of comments from people like, Oh, I just upgraded to the development series. It's amazing. You know, it's such a great thing. And you know, that makes me feel good. But, um, So there's a lot, I'd say. It's pretty active, um, if you sort of pull back and look at it.

Aaron: Yeah, that's something I didn't consider, uh, when I asked the question, actually, is the fact that the standards just keep changing all the time.

Or seemingly, in a way. I mean, and like you said, you don't have backwards compatibility, um, all the time that you can rely on. So you have to have workarounds, I'm sure. So that you can you can keep things as consistent as possible. I know for me I started just personally I started putting up So at the makerspace that I started about eight years ago or something We wanted to have some security cameras in there to make sure that You know people weren't sleeping in there overnight That you know, no in case like we have had a couple instances where somebody Was in the parking lot, like, trying to break into cars and things like that, and so we were able to use some of our cameras, uh, to, to provide some things to the police when they came and were asking us if we saw anything, uh, which is great, but when you try to set up your own network of, uh, monitoring cameras or security cameras, it gets quite tough.

And so when I graduated from using those little, you know, ESP 32 cameras and Raspberry Pi cameras to actual, you know, not professional stuff, but at least in my case, you know, decent cameras, right, that could do things like, uh, infrared and, and things like that, uh, automatically switch for night mode and things.

Um, I needed something a little bit better, and that's when I started looking into Zoneminder. Um, so I can definitely appreciate coming from a, from a DIY effort, right? Of we're just gonna do MJPEG capture and put that on a, on a, on a web page somewhere, right? Live. So that we can see what's going on when we want to, to, oh, I actually really need to record this stuff.

Uh, in case, you know, something does happen. You know, how do I, you know, I don't have the performance I need because, you know, the webpage gets bogged down after I hook up more than a couple of cameras. Right. Um, so going from that to zone minder for my personal use has been really, really amazing. Um, do you find that, uh, People generally have that experience, like the first time user of zone minder.

Like, I don't know how many people you actually talk to or get feedback from, but I mean, is that first time use for someone, the casual user, I guess, uh, kind of taking care of, or is it really meant more for the professional business user that has, you know, 20 or 30 cameras that they want to capture a video from?

Isaac: Um, I do talk to a ton of people and I mean, all the various forums, the Facebook chat bubble, I talk to a lot of people. There's different levels of people, right? The end user generally doesn't know what they're doing. And the first question is, if they can get it installed and running, the first question is, like, how do I add a camera?

How do I find out what the URL is? That's hard, right? And that's something that I've done a lot of work in, in 1. 38. Like, ONVIF takes us a long way there. Like, it's a great standard and stuff. Um, and our support is decent. But For all the cameras that aren't ONVIF compliant, uh, it's hard, right? You've got a, you've got a Google and nobody wants, nobody Googles.

Right. Doesn't happen. That's not

Aaron: something you typically look at. What is that? But can you define that for people that are listening that might not be familiar?

Isaac: Oh, ONVIF? Uh, What does it stand for, uh, Jonathan? I'm Googling now. Or even what is it? What is it? Yeah, it, it, it's a standard, um, pioneered by Axis, who is a, one of the major camera manufacturers and it's a XML SOAP based, uh, protocol for discovery and querying and commands and everything else.

Jonathan: It is, it is the Open Network Video Interface Forum.

Isaac: Yeah, and so that's great, but lots of cameras don't support that. So I've been doing a lot of work actually with, um, uh, based just ARP scanning, recognizing the manufacturer from the MAC address. Um, do a little bit of programming, and so now in 1. 37, we have a scan button, it'll scan your network and list all the devices and any that it can recognize, you just click add, and that's great.

Um, so I've been trying to remove a lot of the pain points for the end users, but really, the other side of it, as you say, the commercial, the large installers, the guys with 50 cameras, um, you know, they, most of the time, they, They know the URL, they're using a professional grade camera that we already support and so they get one and they copy and paste their 50 times and, and, uh, can onboard cameras really easily.

Yeah,

Aaron: so it does, because that's what I found that's been, you know, some of my feedback, which is not good or bad. It's just. It does require a little bit of know how, right, to get things set up. Um, you know, in my case, I bought some cameras, I can't remember what brand, I can look it up if anybody's curious.

Um, on Amazon, and then I had to use their web app to get the initial setup done, right, like the discovery and get the IP address. And I could have grabbed that, of course, off my, uh, DHCP server as well. But anyway, you know, that was the easiest way to find the IP address. And then once I had that. Then I could start plugging things in, but then you also have to look up, at least in my case, tell me if I did this wrong, I also had to look up the specs of the camera a little bit, right.

To see like what it supported. Um, and, uh, and then understand in my head, like, okay, how much video am I going to be capturing and how much storage is this going to take up and how much network bandwidth is this going to take up so that I could balance out my needs. here at the house with what my network would support and how much storage I had.

So a lot of that, I kind of had to become a, uh, um, uh, what do they call those? Uh, uh, if you're in the electrical work, you're, you become like a journeyman or something like that, or, uh, you know, so I had to become like a little bit of a CCTV journeyman in order to understand how to set it up correctly.

Cause at first I was kind of frustrated cause I wasn't getting, um, the results that I wanted. My storage was filling up too fast and I had to figure out how to expire recordings and, um, set up the, the policy that you do for that and everything. So, um, it took a little bit of know how and that's kind of where I see like the entry point for this.

This wouldn't be for someone that doesn't know anything about, um, this field and how it works, right? For that, you would just use the web app that came with the device that you bought, probably. It's like the next level up. Would you agree? I

Isaac: would totally agree, and, and yeah, and I guess that's, that's actually why, you know, all these cloud based or proprietary systems are, are popular is because your average person doesn't want to get into all this stuff, they just want their, their, to be able to call up the footage on their phone, or, you know, and, and so those solutions work for that, um, for some, those of us who don't want to send our video to some corporation in the cloud, too.

You got to dig in and this, and that's a lot to dig into. Like this is, it's, it's mind blowing how much there is to think about and tweak. And, you know, you get into motion settings. Okay. Well, that that's a whole thing. You know, we try to make it simpler and there's still so much work to do there, but, um, Yeah, anyone who, who starts to get into this, it's going to become a hobby, you know, quickly you can make a profession out of it, which is basically what I've done.

Aaron: For sure, Jonathan, I know you probably want, sorry, I don't mean to monopolize the discussion here, so jump in and ask some questions. I'm going to look up, uh, those cameras that I mentioned. I'll talk about my setup and why I chose this setup and how I use ZoneMinder too, but why don't you jump in with some questions and then I'll do that in the background.

Jonathan: Yeah, so we, we kind of just alluded to something and I'm, I'm curious about it, this idea of maybe you don't want your cameras around and maybe even inside your house connected to the internet to be able to send footage off to who knows where, you know, sometimes off to manufacturers that aren't even based in the U.

S. and therefore aren't Aren't, uh, aren't, aren't privy to, uh, you know, they're not party to U. S. law. Um, so I guess the first question is do we have any evidence? Like have we actually seen that being abused by these companies? And then how does ZoneMinder fix that problem?

Isaac: I don't know if we've seen abuse of it, but there was, for example, the Wisehack, where something went wrong and for a period of time people could see other people's footage instead of their own, right?

You know, it's not, it doesn't have to necessarily be malicious, um, it could be simply incompetence and we've seen lots of examples of that. Um, not to say that we are perfect, but when you. When your video doesn't leave your house, you don't have that problem, right? And so how we solve that is by giving the option of the video never leaving your house.

Um, you know, that's, that's how it's done. You have your server, it's in your, you know, Basement or office or whatever. And, you know, it doesn't even have to be a big server with loud fans, you know, for your home use, it could be a Raspberry Pi, it could be an Intel NUC, um, anything, any old PC, an old laptop, anything is, is probably powerful enough to handle most people's home needs.

Um, and so that video never leaves your house. Someone has to hack into your house before they can get it. So it's safe by default ish, you know, um, as safe as anything else that you have on your network.

Jonathan: Do you, do you recommend to folks to do like a, a separate network for the cameras if possible?

Isaac: I would always recommend it, but let's, let's be real.

Most people don't have the knowledge or the time or the effort. Um, and a lot of these cameras you get, you've got to put them on wifi. Bye. Well, how many people are going to segment their Wi Fi and, and all this sort of stuff. It's a level of knowledge that people just aren't going to do. Yeah, that's true.

And for your home, maybe that's okay. You know, because again, if someone's going to hack into your network, they're probably going to be able to hack into any other network you've got too. But on it, obviously the ideal setup is a wired, uh, um, uh, Segmented LAN that can only talk to the ZoneMinder server.

And then it's like a firewall, right, between it and, and, nothing can get those cameras, um, if proper firewall rules, they can't get out, they can't send anything. And that's, to me, the ideal setup. And I mentioned, uh, wired instead of Wi Fi because it's trivial to jam Wi Fi. You know, if someone wants to break into your house, and if you're like, not a casual criminal, but like a professional criminal, it's very easy.

Okay. Suddenly all your Wi Fi cameras aren't showing anything and you can go to town and there'll be no footage of it, right? It's gotta be wired. Um, So that's the ideal, but let's be real, people aren't gonna do that. So, whatever. There are

Jonathan: very

Aaron: few

Jonathan: of them anyway. There's a, there's an almost like 95 percent good enough solution there, where you just go into the camera settings and you give it a bogus router IP address.

That's And that, that'll take care of almost all of that.

Isaac: Yeah, exactly. I mean, in this case, in a, in a good zominder server is also providing DHCP to that segmented LAN and. Don't give it a gateway or, you know, the gateway is, we can provide time services. You know, that's another big thing that, you know, people don't address and they really need to.

Um, the time in the video has to be right or it's useless for law enforcement. You know, the first thing the lawyer will toss out, you know, the video clearly shows it was in 1971. You know, it's, it's got to be right. Yeah, that's true. That's true. All this stuff is way more complex as I'm going in and

Aaron: checking my timestamps, , as soon as you say that, are they all accurate?

Yeah. Yes, they are.

Isaac: Daylight savings time is another big one. Like every time they change those, well, the camera doesn't know about it. You've gotta, it's gotta go in and change. It's daylight. Savings times rules. No,

Aaron: they're not. Yeah, these timestamps are not accurate.

Jonathan: All you need to get 'em right. If you ever try to use the evidence.

What times is it?

Aaron: Okay, this one says 9 52. This one says 1152. This one says nine o'clock and I can't read that. I'd have to go into the larger view. Thank you. I'm going to go fix these. Yeah,

Jonathan: there you go. Now. So this is, this is an interesting question. It's something that comes up from time to time. Are those timestamps provided by the cameras or are they provided by zone minder?

Isaac: Is that a question for

Jonathan: Aaron or for me? Well, I guess, I guess for Aaron first.

Aaron: I think these are from the camera.

Jonathan: Okay.

Aaron: I, I think there's another timestamp, a littler timestamp from ZoneMinder on these. That is accurate. Yeah. What's, what's

Jonathan: real fun is when you have two timestamps on a, on a, on an image and, uh, you know, they may be showing something different.

Um, there's, there's kind of an issue with ZoneMinder. Yeah. And I don't know how we would go about fixing this, but, you know, folks should be aware of it. Um, and Isaac tell me if this is not the case anymore, but last I checked, uh, if you're doing pass through recording, which means we're not recording the JPEGs, we're just taking that H.

264 stream from the camera and dumping it straight to disk, ZoneMinder is not writing a timestamp on there. That's still the case, right?

Isaac: Absolutely correct. Yep. So, um, to do, to put it in there, requires re encoding the video, which, you know, now you need some, some, you know, GPU, you know, which, which can, you can do.

Lots of people have a GPU that's well capable of doing that. Um, and in fact, you know, most people, if you've got the Intel GPU, Intel chips have a, have a great, uh, media encoding support in there, and that will work just great. And then, you know, we can write anything you want into it, but, you know, so many systems It's running on systems that don't have a GPU, maybe because they're old, or, or perhaps it's on a server hardware that, you know, they give them these crippled little It's not even a real Matrox chip, it's, it's just Speaks that language and it's totally crippled in terms of video hardware, they don't have anything.

So it's going to be all CPU and it doesn't work. Um, I'm not entirely sure how we could even address it other than, you know, maybe you could occasionally like put in a timestamp, like only re encode. You know, every 10 frames or something, but ideally, you know, I think the best way is to have the camera do as much as possible.

Um, and that brings me to someday I really want to do a line of cameras that are running zone minder in the camera, because I just think that would be awesome and you wouldn't need big servers, uh, you know, the cameras are powerful these days. So that's the dream, but, um,

Jonathan: interesting. Yeah, that's a that's a really interesting idea and I know I know you've kicked that around before Uh, in in fact, i've got a camera behind me on the floor That's taken to pieces with me trying to look at the cpu like I wonder if we can get into that I wonder if I can ssh into that and there is a project out there for doing uh, custom camera firmware Um, it's just the problem there.

It's the same problem that like open wrt has and your custom TV firmware has. There's, there's literally 5, 000 between your brands and your models and your revisions, hardware revisions. There's literally 5, 000 different cameras out there to try to support and it's just, it's basically impossible to have one piece of firmware that would run on all of them.

Isaac: Yeah. Again, an open WRT like firmware would be fantastic. And I did once actually put open WRT on a D link, DCS 9 32 L camera that I had, that I, that's great. I, you know, I got pins on the jeg spots and, and they're really easy to get into, right? Mm-Hmm, . So I was able to do that and I got it working. And, um, I don't know, the cameras are so old, it kind of lost interest.

It's still in a box somewhere, but I've lost interest. I think if we were to go this route, we would simply contact a Chinese manufacturer and, you know, we'd have to order a thousand and just go through the requirements to, to put it on. Because they're all running Linux already. Um, compiling the, the subset of ZoneMinder for them should be pretty easy.

Not that much work. Um, anyway, someday we'll get to it. It's just, there aren't enough people contributing to zone minder to do it. Um, yet.

Jonathan: And, and nobody's written you that big seven figure check for setting up a zone minder server somewhere.

Isaac: No, no. I'm sure they're out there wondering how to contact me.

They're probably listening.

Jonathan: Sure. I'm

Isaac: here. I'm here,

Jonathan: guys. Seven figure checks are accepted.

Isaac: Yeah. State actors? I'm here. If you

Jonathan: Yeah. That's uh That's something that Do we want to talk about that? I think that's on your list of things you sent us. Uh, about the whole XZ, the LiveXZ vulnerability. Do we want to get into that?

Isaac: Um, I don't know how much we can get into it, but I, I, when I was reading that, it really hit home to me. Um, because I have felt that, that the whole process they talked about where um, it sort of broke him down, um, I thought you had blanking on his name now.

Jonathan: Lassie Cullen, I think?

Isaac: Yeah. And I, and I just like, oh man, I feel for the guy because I've seen it. Yeah. And, and I haven't succumbed yet. Um, every patch that comes in, I read every line. I'm looking for those vulnerabilities. Not with the assumption that they're malicious, but let's face it, not everyone's a very good coder.

And, uh, you know, we have to be secure. And so I'm looking for. You know, are you assuming that this input is proper and it's not, everything's got to be sanitized. And stuff gets by me, I miss stuff too, but the point is I do my best. And I've never really felt like I needed to give up maintainership. I would certainly welcome, and I do welcome more maintainers.

That's, you know, something that, uh, That's a problem I think Zominder has is, is that we don't have enough. No one's reviewing my code. I'd push for master all the time and no one is reviewing my code. They're all trusting me. Uh, I wish that wasn't the case. Didn't used to be the case. We, and we used to, we used to have a bunch of guys, um, Uh, Andy, Kyle and Steve, who, um, were very active and they're less active now, you know, their, their lives have taken them off in other directions.

They're still around from time to time, but they're, they're, they're Not reviewing my stuff. So, um, and that, that's a, that's a problem every package has, and it's probably susceptible to, is there should not be one maintainer. Um, it doesn't matter how much of a saint or, you know, extreme professionally, whatever superstar he is, um, or he is mm-Hmm, , uh, or he or she or they or whatever pronoun.

Um, it shouldn't be down to one person. Mm-Hmm. , it can't be, um. But I've definitely seen, um, behavior from people that is, is really breaks you down and makes you not want to be a maintainer. And, uh, so I just, I just thought that was really interesting and it's definitely happening.

Jonathan: Yeah. Do you, are you kind of, uh, suggesting that maybe some of that was intentional or are we just talking about, Human behavior can be disheartening.

Isaac: I think it's probably both. Um, and also culture is a big thing. You know, when you're dealing with people from around the world, Um, it can be a language issue, Um, it can be a cultural issue, Um, and, If you're not well traveled in the world, you may not understand that that is what's happening.

Aaron: Um,

Isaac: I've certainly had to learn, to learn that, and I've learned it kind of the hard way.

Um, different parts of the world, uh, operate a little differently.

Jonathan: I always try to keep that, that potential language barrier in mind when I get an email or I see a pull request or a bug report. You go, you read through it and your first thought is, man, this guy's an idiot. Like, just honestly, sometimes that's what comes to mind.

And then you realize, oh, no, wait a second. English is his third language. I'm the dumb one here. And he's actually making a really good point. It's just hard for me to parse it. Mm

Aaron: hmm.

Isaac: And it can be real hard to keep that perspective in the back of your mind, right? If you're in a, something else is stressing you and, you know, It happens, we're all humans, so.

But the XV hack makes us think, oh, maybe sometimes it is malicious. So you gotta keep that in the back of your mind too. It's scary, and especially, you know, in this time of wars and upheaval, uh, you know, you really got to keep your wits about you.

Jonathan: Yeah, true. Especially working on something like ZoneMinder.

Because it, you know, not, not the kind of target that SSHD is, but like, there are ZoneMinder installs in, uh, potentially sensitive places. I, I know some of the customers that you have had in the past, and I am sure that that would be, some of those would be considered, you know, sensitive manufacturing. Um, so, yeah, that's something to keep in mind.

Aaron, you were going to tell us a little bit more about your setup there, I think.

Aaron: Yeah, and I did have a question, um, but I'll, I'll tell you about my setup, and then I'll, then I'll, uh, get your, get your thoughts, and I'll, uh, I do have a question on cameras as well. But I'm using, I looked them up, I'm using, uh, Amcrest.

A M C R E S T. We like Amcrest. Cameras. Yep. And actually I'm using three different models. Um, because I needed a mix of some Wi Fi. Um, and some, well, I didn't have to go with the Wi I could have gone all Wi Fi, but there's places where my Wi Fi isn't as strong. And so I decided to go power over Ethernet, uh, wired cameras for those.

Um, so I've got those. They're like, uh, Ultra HD, 4K, 8 megapixel. outdoor cameras, uh, blah, blah, blah. They have the night vision and stuff. And they were pretty reasonable, you know, they're off brand. I'm assuming that they're probably, um, I don't know much about the Amcrest brand, but they seemed pretty good.

The reviews seemed pretty strong. So I got, uh, like I said, I got a mix of those. You've got the wifi ones for the ones that can do wifi, uh, with a pretty, pretty decent, um, rate over the network. Because I didn't want to have to run cables everywhere too, right? I mean, it's a trade off. How, how much, how much cables do you want to run, especially in your house?

How many holes do you want to drill in your walls and have to refill so the cold air doesn't get back in? Um, and, you know, so, so, you know, one of them is just completely Wi Fi. It just plugs in outdoor. Yes, I know someone could come along and, well, actually, no, that one I wired into my light socket. So, but you could come cut the cord, right?

Like if you were a nefarious person, you could very easily just come and cut the cord and turn that one off. But anyway, so I'm using Amcrest, um, and they're, they're working pretty well. They do motion detection pretty well. And the reason we got them was, was, was. Two fold, but really more for my wife than anything, because my wife is a 7th grade English teacher.

And, uh, what we found is that occasionally, uh, a young child will get upset that they got caught cheating on an exam and got a F on their exam for, for cheating on it. And, uh, sometimes kids like to carry eggs with them apparently. And, uh, you know, if you don't have any evidence that a particular kid, even though you're 99 percent sure which one it was, uh, did something to your house, then there's nothing really you can do about it.

So we decided, you know what, let's just get these, uh, get it, get them installed. And then if anything does happen, at least we've got some, some video evidence of it. And then also too, since I'm a YouTuber, you know, You just never know, right? My stuff is out there, it's pretty easy to figure out where I live, so, uh, I just figured, you know, better safe than sorry.

Uh, have something recording all the time and, uh, capture, capture that if something happens. So that's my, uh, physical install in my story. I'm running zone minder 1. 36. 33. Um, haven't upgraded it in a while, but I, so I don't know how far behind that is. I think you mentioned 1. 37 before, but I don't know how many minor releases are in between those.

Isaac: Yeah, it might be worth mentioning that. The way we have always done versioning, and I don't know how much longer we're going to keep this pattern up, but the even numbers are considered stable. So when I released 1. 36, everything since then, you know, through 3. 6. 1. 2, they're just bug fixes. Like really, no new features, um, nothing really changes unless we, it's like, really trivial.

Um, and then we go off and start breaking things. So the, if it's an odd number, 1. 37, uh, we make no promises about it, it working, you know, that being said, we fix things quickly. So I run 1. 37 in production for all of my, my clients. Um, I don't update them every day. Generally, I, you know, I know how stable things are.

Nobody's complaining for a few weeks. Okay. You know, update everybody. Um, and then I go break something new, you know? So it's kind of like a, it's like a sine wave pattern or something between stability and, and, and breakage. But very rarely do I ever break things really seriously. And like I said, if I do back it out real quick, get a new release out and, and, um, get things.

Moving on. So,

Aaron: yeah. So should I be looking at 1. 38 as my next upgrade target?

Isaac: That will be the next stable release. And we're starting to talk about like, Hey, maybe we should just release it instead of waiting for every single idea to be done, um, because it's, there's a significant, it's been several years of work and, uh, You know, I think there's actually been, uh, But there has been, there's been two full FFmpeg, if not three in that, in that time span.

You know, they've really ramped things up, so we've got to catch up. But, I kind of, I really feel like we need to be a little bit more like home assistant, you know? Like, maybe monthly, maybe quarterly, something. Because, um, honestly, I look at the 1. 36 interfaces and things, and I find them agonizing, and all these features that we've worked on, and I'm like, You know, that problem is solved if you'll just upgrade.

Um, so it's difficult. It's difficult, you know, figuring out versioning and stability versus new features. Um, and we have probably waited too long for the next release. But yeah, 1. 38 will be the next stable series. We'll pick a, um, A name based on a Metallica album, and, uh, off we'll go.

Aaron: Nice, nice. What about the, the, we talked about cameras and how you'd like to develop your own camera, uh, or somebody to develop a camera with ZoneMinder built in.

What about the ones that are on the market today? And do you have, like, recommendations to give to people that are more friendly to ZoneMinder or, or, or, you know, easier to set up on ZoneMinder? Thank you.

Isaac: Most proper cameras will be fine. Alright, like Amcrest, I just want to put a shout out to them.

They're the only company that's actually supported Zomato. They sent me a box of their entire home line. Unfortunately, they weren't the sort of more professional grade. They don't do ONVIF. They don't have a web UI to configure them. It's all with the app. But, Aside from that, they're, they're great cameras and the URLs are standard.

And, you know, they gave me those to make sure that they'd work with zoneminder and they do. Uh, so that's great. Um, so we like them, uh, and I also know, you know, their high end cameras are really nice. I know there's one guy who hangs out, uh, in their Slack channel and stuff, and you got some new ones. And, you know, proper optical zoom.

You know, he can zoom in miles away and see things crisply, clearly, and like, that's really nice.

Aaron: Um,

Isaac: and as we know, there's a, you know, whatever you can have on camera storage, you can, you know, their motion detection is good, it's all standards based, it works. Thanks. So love Amcrest. Um, VivoTech cameras, um, I've had experience with a lot of them, they work well.

One thing that's kind of interesting, and I've only sort of got into it, and discovered it, and figured it out, I find, now these are older cameras, uh, They're, I don't know about their new ones, but they really have unstable clocks. So back to like getting your time right, you've got to have NTP set up because in the middle of your stream, it'll jump back an hour or something and like, or it's too fast or kind of weird.

But in terms of, again, a solid camera, um, great reliability, easy to set up. As I've had experience with them, you know, Zominder will detect them and automatically configure it. Um, HikVision is probably the most popular, um, and, um, most of the cameras you're buying probably are HikVisions. They're one of the most OEM white labeled cameras there is.

Um, and today I find their hardware to be just fantastic. They have their own standard called, PSIA, which was a competitor to ONVIF, and I guess they lost. Except, can you really say they lost? Because probably most cameras out there are HikVision. Um, but we support both of those and, and again, they detect well.

The quality is fantastic. The reliability of the image. Um, China, like, Dahua are fine. Um,

Jonathan: all those Chinese, Hanwha. What if somebody wanted, for various reasons, an American made camera. Is there a company out there?

Isaac: That's a very good question. I think,

Jonathan: I think AXIS maybe?

Isaac: AXIS are actually, I think, based out of Montreal. They're actually Canadian, but that's good. I don't know. Of course, who, where's the corporate actual ownership? I don't know. But yeah, they're, they're North American. Um, where are they actually manufactured?

I couldn't tell you.

Jonathan: Um, I guess it depends who you're installing cameras for, how picky they're going to be about that.

Isaac: Yeah. And I mean, right now we have, you know, the governments are banning, for example, Hikvision cameras and cameras made in China. And so a lot of these other cameras, like I mentioned, Vivotech, they're Vietnamese.

Haiwa is Taiwanese. Um, you know, whatever, they're made outside of China, but still in the South Pacific. Um, Hard. You have to really do your research to find out where a particular brand of camera is made. And so, if you are a government agency, um, you know, obviously there, I'm sure there's a guideline somewhere of who you can buy.

Um, for the rest of us, do we care? Not really. Because, We either, like you've got to lock them down, don't trust a camera from anywhere, right? Lock it down, don't give it access to the internet, that sort of thing. Um, so that's what I have to say about cameras. Almost anything you buy today is good as long as it, it, if it says on VIF, that's good.

Um, But a lot of people that buy stuff off Amazon that it only works with the app. I mean, you mentioned earlier what's the first, you know, stumbling block people have. Well, their cameras cannot ever be supported by a zone winder. The video only goes to the cloud and through their proprietary app. Well, it can't do that.

You're going to have to go out and buy new cameras. Um, we've seen a disturbing thing. I wanted to mention another maker. Reolink has also traditionally been great. Uh, reasonable price, really good quality. But we're starting to get reports on some of their newer models don't work. They're going that cloud app only.

Um, and I don't have any, but I think I'm going to have to get some. Um, TP Link makes some nice cameras. Um, that. we can work with. Um, I guess they updated the code for doing the pan tilt zoom controls and our interface doesn't work with it anymore. So that's on the to do list to look into and fix. But it's, you know, cheap and good cameras.

Jonathan: There's been some fun things. So I'm sitting here thinking about what, uh, what Aaron is missing out on by still running the old version and, uh, Of course, I can only think of the things that I've worked on, right? So, like, the H. 264 passthrough right to the browser, and the ONVIF based motion detection events.

Those are a couple of things that are new that, uh, those are particularly useful if you have multiple cameras at high frame rate and you don't want to build a whole server for it. What else, what else is new in ZoneMinder that we can really tempt Aaron with to get him off into the developer releases?

Thanks.

Isaac: Oh, man, I, you know, in hindsight, I should have actually, uh, gone through and made a list. I started to make a video actually comparing the two one day and, you know, after two hours of recording, I realized I just had to quit and then I realized the audio was crap and I never got back to it. Um,

One thing that comes to mind immediately, um, we've got a great contributor who's just been going crazy on the user interface, you know, tweaking spacing, tweaking layout, um, and then he jumped in. And when you're zoomed into the video, if you weren't looking at where you want to look, you'd have to zoom out and then zoom back in somewhere else.

You may know, you can like shift. Click and like drag around and zoom around inside the zoomed in video, which if you're a person who uses zoom, that is so cool because it's painful, the zooming in and zooming out. Oh, I clicked the wrong spot. It's too far over here. You know, that's a big one. I might even have to backport that to 1.

36. Um, cause that one's really cool. Um, Oh my, um, there are features that. Um, don't show up. We're working on a floor plan thing so you could upload an image of your grounds and you could drop where the cameras are and show them and stuff like that. Um, geolocation stuff is part of that. You can, you know, do a map of the world where your stuff is.

If you're someone who is looking at a large graphical area, uh, there's that. You can where your cameras are in the world. Um, there's a new feature. It's on demand capture. Um, So this is for, you only want the system to be doing anything when you want to look at a camera, so instead of constantly streaming, constantly consuming resources, basically when you go log into Zominder and you click on that camera, it starts the capturing process then.

Um, So we have a customer and there are, you know, thousands and thousands of cameras out there around North America. But they're only interested, they just want to be able to view what the cameras are looking at from time to time. They don't, they're not recording, they're not doing anything like that.

They just want to be able to look into this place. So that is a great feature for them. Nice. Um, We've got this new feature called tags where you just you can tag an event and you give like a keyword, uh, which, um, should help in with the efficiency of motion detection and adding more data to, to events.

And, you know, so you, you, and just, I don't know, maybe your tag will be dogs, you know, you can now, as you're going through, you can flag every event that has a dog in it for later, whatever you want to do with that, you know, uh, really efficient, really nice. Is there,

Jonathan: is there anything around the idea of having AI doing tagging for you?

Isaac: Well, yes. Um, see currently the event server, um, it updates this notes field and it just adds text to it, right? And so I, I haven't pushed it, but I have a branch where we. Insert a tag instead. So instead of, you know, dog 36%, it'll tag it with dog. Um, and so then you can Like, currently Okay, so now the big thing UI wise, in the events list, I now automatically put, um, filter options at the top.

So you can, um, filter the events better. And one of them is, is, um, Is the notes field. And we had put default entries that, you know, come with YOLO, dog, cat, boat, car, potted plant, or any objects. So you can quickly jump to that and get all the events that actually have something in them as opposed to snowstorm.

Um, so that's a big one in terms of, of filtering down your events. Cause before you have to go and make a filter. You know, add all those rules and lines and, and, you know, that's not exactly user friendly, um, but you could do it, right? Um, which reminds me of another thing. Yeah, because I'm noticing

Aaron: as you're talking about this, I'm looking through my, um, my motion detect events, right?

And they're mostly cars going by. Like, I'm looking at the one that faces the street. Um, even the ones at night are, um, are just cars going by, right? So if I could just, like, filter all those out, um, because really all I'm concerned about, I think, is people. Yeah. So if there was, like, an AI that could just, like, filter out all the, all the ones that are just cars, like, unless there's a person in it, then get rid of it.

Well, you,

Isaac: you can configure your event server to ignore cars. Like, there's a matched pattern thing. Um, Again, this is not user friendly, uh, and that's one of the things on our list for 1. 38 is, you know, roughing in at least the basics of AI configuration in the WebZone Mitre UI because PlayablePixels, when he wrote all this stuff, um, you know, he used INI files and YAML to do all this configuration because it's really complicated.

And I don't think we can get totally away from that but, you know, at least defaults of, you know, Witch. Um, you know, whether it's YOLO 4 or 5, and I'm only interested in people and dogs, you know, we should be able to do that, at least in terms of the web configuration. But you can go in and you can filter out anything.

Aaron: Yeah, and we should say the filtering in here, the filters themselves are generic enough and powerful enough that you can do a lot with them. At least that's my opinion. Uh, So when we say filters, I mean, I've got three, three generic filters on, right? Which is mostly around my storage disk space. So like purge when full or delete old events.

And I've configured those to delete the recordings I no longer need automatically. So I don't have to, because the first thing I ran into was my storage device filled up on my server because I wasn't deleting anything, duh. Um, but, but you can do all sorts of things with filters. I mean, it's, it must be hard because I mean, You've got something here that's really written that can be used by anybody, right?

But it really has powerful features that can be used by security professionals too And so you have to be able to provide for both of those Audiences and i'm guessing the skew is more towards the security professional end Um, because if you only have one or two cameras You know, diminishing returns on, on zone miter.

Right. But if you've got like me, if you've got, you know, a bunch of them, or if you're in a, in a commercial setting where you've got a bunch of cameras, it really makes a lot of sense.

Isaac: Yeah. Um. You know, a common example, I mean, when you start getting into notifications, uh, you know, some people, they're like, every morning when I get into work, I want an email that lists if anything weird happened overnight, right?

So you can create a filter that looks for people. Uh, between the hours of this and that, um, you know, and, and that's really useful. It, it takes a little customization and, you know, it can email you that, or you can go so far as to have it SMS you when the event happens, right? That's why event server exists, because Playable Pixels wanted that.

He wanted to know when his son got home from school. He wanted to know if it was a UPS delivery, um, but it's complicated and then, you know, you start digging in and it takes a lot of effort to set up. And if you're You know, a business or a corporation, it's probably worth your time to give us a call because we have examples, we've done this before, you know, we can probably get you going real quick.

Um, and then we store those filters. And this reminds me of another difference between 1. is in 1. 36 there was only one email. Content body, whatever that you could do, you know, it was set up under options. Now it's part of the filter. Every filter can have its own different email, its own different, uh, from and to.

So you can now have different emails going to different people in the organization. Um, and we also, uh, created a, it's a summary email. Before it was, you know, one email per event. So you might have a thousand events in your inbox in the morning. Now you get one email. Um, a lot of work with, uh, inlining the attached images.

So on your phone, it, You know, the image just comes up, you know, it's just part of the email, uh, you know, instead of having to like save to desktop and view it, you know. Ton of work done in there to make that a little nicer.

Aaron: Are there, as you're thinking about it, are there features that like, uh, like Nest or Ring?

Um, you know, those kind of commercial devices, are there features that they have that you're like, oh, I wish we could do that. I wish we could integrate that. Like, what's on your wish list.

Isaac: I got a lot of my wish list, but that was a big one. Like, that's the two way audio thing, right? Is a big desire. Um, there are cameras out there with microphone or speakers and stuff, and we could do two way audio.

We need to integrate WebRTC better so that we can. It helps us with the viewing of the video, but also so we can do that two way audio thing. Um, and these are, these are proprietary devices.

Jonathan: Yeah. Well, the problem is WebRTC is, is such a, well, let's see how people described it to me. Um, if you're on the happy path, it's really, really good, but otherwise it's terribly broken and it's really hard to fix.

WebRTC is terrible and it does not just work.

Isaac: Yeah, well, they've done that thing where they pick a subset of everything that's out there to support. And so You know, it, it's, it, our gen, we did Janis didn't work so well for us because cameras frequently don't put out the right H 2 64. Yeah.

Jonathan: Mm.

Isaac: Right. Um, and so if you could get your cameras, I'm hoping that matures.

Jonathan: Yeah. If you could get your cameras to put out just the right H 2 64 baseline, that, that, and really what it is, it's the browsers because they have a separate code path for doing web RTC as opposed to all of their other video decoding. So if you can get just that right. H. 264 stream. It is beautiful and it works great.

Um, there is something coming. Uh, I have been haunting the, the, the Google Chrome development lists and, uh, there's active work on H. 265 in WebRTC and we kind of look to that as our savior, hopefully.

Isaac: Yeah, I feel like AV1 is going to come along before that actually comes to fruition, but um, AV1 is very exciting too.

Jonathan: But how many cameras will spit out AV1 streams? Well,

Isaac: there

Jonathan: aren't

Isaac: any right now,

Jonathan: so Yeah. Okay, so before we let you go, we've got to ask, I want to get this in, what's up with Xeom Ninja? And for those that don't know, that is the cross platform mobile application that kind of went away for a while. Is it back?

Isaac: Sort of. Um, So, for those who don't know, the author of Playable Pixels, uh, basically stepped away from all things. So, in minder, he went pure Google. Um, and he made it free, and, and, you know, the source was always open source, but, you know, basically gave it to us to do with what we want. And for, Two years, I sort of tried to get it to compile, but I, there's too much.

I'm not a JavaScript developer. I don't know any of these technologies. Um, you know, it's, it's a Cordova, Ionic, Angular app. And anyway, um, I was able to find someone who could help us out, and we got it compiling for, Android, uh, which is great. So there are new versions out. We've fixed a bunch of problems with it.

Um, I wouldn't say it's getting active development every now and then. I, I am supporting it. You know, I, I, I fix bugs if I can. Um, but the, at the end of the day, the technologies that it was built with have been abandoned. Like you can, it's like everyone who was using. These technologies just stopped two years ago.

And Android keeps changing its APIs and what it allows you to do, and so some features are broken. But in general it works. It's fine. People like it. They pay for it. And it's working fine on Android. We have not been able to get it to compile for Apple for iOS. But the old version still works. So that's okay for now.

Um But, you know, there are changes in the APIs for 1. 37 and it's going to break. Uh, so that, that's, it's kind of on life support, uh, for iOS devices. Um, what can be done? I don't know. Um.

Jonathan: We made it

Isaac: non free, you know, it costs five dollars. So the idea was to funnel that money to somebody who's willing to do that work.

Um, I don't know anyone who's willing to do that work yet, but if you're out there, if you're listening. Uh, we've also discussed rewriting it in, um, Flutter, is that

Aaron: the

Isaac: word? Um, I'm not going to have time. So it's really, it's going to be someone else who does that.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isaac: Um, but at the same time, we do put effort into making the normal Zoneminder web UI better on mobile.

There's been a little bit of work done lately. It's, it's improved a lot. There's a lot more to go.

Aaron: Maybe we can get, maybe we can get Randall to, to help with that. He's a big Flutter guy now, isn't he? That, that thought has

Jonathan: been kicked around. Yes. Well, like

Isaac: I said, it, you know, it's, our income from these apps is about 750 a month.

Which could. Even more than that could go to somebody if they got the time. The problem is I can't afford, you know, what do I, would I have to pay someone more like 5, 000 a month? I don't know. What is it? I can't pay a full time developer. Someone's got to do it for the fun and the glory.

Aaron: I'll agree. I've only used the uh, ZoneMinder.

I've never used the app, right? So I've only used the uh, the web. You know, pulled up the web page on my phone and it's been fine. It's not, not perfect. It's not pretty like an app might be, but it works totally fine for me anyway. And

Jonathan: it's getting better. One of the, one of the, one of the real problems, um, that is a problem with the app getting sunsetted is particularly on iOS because on iOS there's only one browser.

And, you know, you, you install Chrome on iOS and you just have, you have a Chrome theming on top of Safari. Um, and Safari doesn't necessarily always handle media correctly. So that's, that's one of the real pain points with trying to do some of the more advanced things like streaming H264 right to a mobile device that just tends to not work very well in, in iOS Safari.

Um, so yeah, it's a big problem. Solutions to be found. Uh, Aaron, do you want to get into anything? We are getting, we are basically at the bottom of the hour. Do you want to get any, any questions before I start to wrap?

Aaron: Uh, I mean, I don't think so. I think, you know, no, no, I don't have any other questions. Uh, you know, once I had this thing set up, I will tell people if they're listening and thinking about trying out Zominder, you know, once I had it set up It was great.

I mean, the initial setup took some know how, right? But now that it's running, it's been super reliable. I just go in, I look for stuff when I need to, when I don't need to, I know that it's running in the background, not in the background, but, uh, you know, at least in my mind, it's running in the background and it's just working.

And, uh, so, um, no, I don't have any final questions, but, you know, thanks to you and everybody that's, uh, that's worked on this project over so many years because, uh, you know, it really is a great, not only a great project, but a great service that you're providing so that people don't have to rely on their data being stored somewhere where they may not want it.

Um, and rely on those, the way that the camera developers want to, uh, position their products and work with their products. So we can all get a little bit more secure and, and uh, yeah, thanks. Yeah.

Jonathan: My pleasure. Um, I do want to ask, uh, there's about five different questions I was hoping to get to and we are out of time.

It's gone really fast. Um, are you seriously trying to write everything in Perl?

Isaac: Some, some days I want to PHP is, is an interesting language and I would say it's getting better, but at the same time it's getting closer and closer to C and I've always loved Perl. I've been coding primarily in Perl my entire career.

So some days. Uh, yeah, I, I make that joke, uh, but no, it's not going to happen.

Jonathan: I have, I have threatened to go on a tear and take out all of the Perl and all of the PHP and do everything in C and WebSockets and JavaScript. Uh, that is an equally monumental task.

Isaac: Yeah. Well, I mean, let's be real. There are lots of alternatives to Zoom that are in JavaScript.

Like, like Shinobi is all JavaScript, right? It's, it's doable. Um, I, my JavaScript. It comes from the 2000s, right? And I think it's fine for working in a browser. I don't want to use it anywhere else. And modern JavaScript just makes my, my heads explode, you know, the asynchronous stuff. And then it's just like, okay, I can deal with it, but I don't want to do it.

So. I'm very happy with my old school languages and stuff, and that's where I'm going to stay.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. Uh, what is the, what is the thing that has most surprised you about the way somebody has used ZoneMinder? What, what's the email that you've gotten where somebody said, hey, I took ZoneMinder and I did this with it, and, and you just couldn't believe it?

Isaac: Well, we've had some, some weird stuff, um, even, even recently, you know, we had a, someone who Because they, I think it's that Chinese camera problem, they want to use everything, uh, you know, homemade. They wanted to outfit their entire network with Raspberry Pis, with PoE hats, and, and, you know, distribute ZoneMinder across, like, 300 Raspberry Pis.

Like, a lot. Okay, that's a unique way to go. We're here to help you with that. That's cool. Um, but I know, you know, people monitor, uh, growing environments for fish or nature habitats or, you know, wonderful uses that are just really cool. I wish people would send me more interesting footage. Occasionally, someone does and, you know, maybe there's a bear in the yard or something.

I love that stuff. Um. You know, I've, I've used it to detect, um, mice. I think there's a mouse. Where is he coming from? I mean, you just put a camera on the floor and you've got the footage of it, you know? It's, it's, I did that. I

Aaron: thought I was having a raccoon get in my, well, I know there was a raccoon that was getting in my garage.

And I wanted to get him on camera. So I took one of my cameras, one of the, one of the wifi ones and put it out in the garage and, uh, yeah, never, never did get any good footage of him, but

Isaac: yeah. Actually, someone was, was posting, um, they had snakes in the wiring in their basement.

Jonathan: Oh, I remember that.

Isaac: Oh yeah.

I stared at that video for like minutes before I realized what I was seeing. Oh, wow.

Jonathan: Yikes. Oh, all right. So I've got to ask as we let you go, what is, uh, what's your favorite scripting language and text editor? I think we know the answer maybe to one of those.

Isaac: Yeah, I'm, I'm a Perl diehard and, uh, I'm a Vim user.

From way back. Um, I resisted the switch to colorized Vim, but for 24 years now, it's been colorized Vim. Yep.

Jonathan: Yep. Understood. All right. So if somebody wants to get questions answered or maybe even pay you money to help get their system set up, where's a good place to start to learn more about Zoneminder?

Isaac: Well, if you go to zoneminder. com, um, you know, all the information's there. There's a chat, one of those annoying chat bubbles will pop up. Um, I'm on the other end of it. Um, you can email me. Yeah, well, I mean, I might not be paying attention, but uh, you know, the response time might not be good. But I will.

And uh, otherwise email Isaac at zoneminer. com or really anything at zoneminer. com will get to me.

Jonathan: Alright. Awesome. Thank you, sir. So much for being here. And, uh, Aaron, what do you think? Have we, uh, have we convinced you to update to the bleeding edge version yet?

Aaron: Probably not. Like I said, I've got it, I've got it working, you know, I'll wait.

I'm happy to wait until things are tested unless there was like, you know, some sort of, you know, urgent security. Like we talked about, right. There are some things that will force me to, uh, to update, but I think, you know, I'm happy enough with the way that it's working. I look forward to using those features that you mentioned when I do upgrade.

Um, but for now, yeah, everything's working. It's, it's been working for a few years now, um, since I really. Really bit the bullet and installed zone minder and got everything working. So I'm totally happy with it. It's meeting our needs as a, as a family and as a, as a dad that wants to, you know, keep their, uh, keep a watch on what goes on around their house and stuff.

So. Yeah, it's working great. I'm quite happy with it.

Jonathan: I got, I got serious about having a zone minder installed when this house, we, we bought this house and gutted it and worked on it for actually for quite a while. And one Sunday we were off at church actually. And a couple of guys came and kicked in the back door of the house here and helped themselves to a very reasonably nice generator and so that just kind of walked off and thankfully that was the only thing that was taken because we had a neighbor that was Paying attention, but one of the next things I did it's like, all right It's time to start pulling cable and get internet there and we're getting cameras set up So I I wired everything about the house to be able to put cameras in now.

We're just Bristling security cameras pointing every direction.

Aaron: Yeah. Awesome. Well, that's too bad that that happened, but yeah, definitely something to keep in mind. I mean, I, I think that, you know, I try not to go. I know people that go a little overboard, right? Like they're thinking about it all the time and it's like, okay, that's my, might be a little too much, but yeah, like I said, I, I, I keep our, I know our stuff is recording and monitoring and doing motion detection.

And now I don't have to worry about it as much. So for me, it's a piece of mind. Yeah, now I know there's two timestamps and the one that comes from Zobeminder is the right one. So that's good.

Jonathan: There you go. Uh, fun times. All right. Is there anything that you want to plug, Aaron, before I let you go? Of

Aaron: course.

Of course. Yeah. Go to YouTube and look up RetroHackShack. If you like old computers, uh, vintage stuff and, and, uh, repair and, and history. I've got two channels now. So there's RetroHackShack, which is where most of the history and like, you know, Super interesting stuff ends up living. Well, I think it's going to be super interesting.

The last video didn't do too well for whatever reason. I thought, Oh, this'll take off like crazy. Right? I know it's like my worst video. Uh, so anyway, uh, but, but I try to put like more of the history bent kind of stuff on retro hack shack. And then if you go to retro hack shack. After hours, uh, you'll find my e waste Wednesday videos there where I go to e waste and I always find crazy stuff, uh, there and feature it on the channel.

And then also, you know, just random stuff, like more of the audio, if I do audio repair or. Just hey, here's this goofy thing I thought projects, you know things like that. I'll put those on that channel because there's a certain subset of my audience that's really interested in that and then there's a Rather large portion of my audience that isn't interested in that so I decided to carve that off Yeah onto its own channel and that's doing really well too.

So retro hack shack and retro hack shack after hours Go check it out.

Jonathan: Cool. All right. Well, thank you, sir, for being here. The things that I will mention is you can follow my work and occasionally Aaron's work. We cover his stuff from time to time over at Hackaday. That's hackaday. com. We've got the security column goes live there every Friday.

And of course, Hackaday is the sponsor, the home of Floss Weekly. Now we sure appreciate that. Um, Let's see, you can find more of my work on Twitter at JP underscore Bennett. I've got the YouTube channel. I've got to buy me a coffee, uh, all of those things and, uh, feel free to check them out. Uh, next week we are actually still looking for a guest for next Wednesday.

So if there is a, uh, if there is a project that you want to see either, uh, Let us know about it, or even better, get ahold of someone from the project and have them send us an email and that's floss at hackaday. com and that'll come straight to me and we will get them scheduled up. Uh, looking forward to whoever it is we get to talk to next week.

It'll be a lot of fun and we will see you then next time on Floss Weekly.