On Wed, Jan 2, 2019, at 04:22, Nick Holland wrote: > Yes, I'd suggest an OpenBSD gateway to a commercial DVR security system > rather than rolling your own, if it is really to be a security system > (as opposed to maybe a, "who's at my front door?" or "what are the local > wildlife doing when I'm asleep?" cameras). The police may need to > extract the video from it without your assistance if you are unavailable > (or worse) as part of whatever they are investigating and maintain a > chain of custody; this won't happen if you roll your own. I'll admit I > hadn't thought of that until a police officer friend of mine started > telling me about the training he was taking on exactly this topic -- > *they* need to be able to get the video out of the device in a timely > manner, and they have to explain to the judge and jury how it was done. > > Nick. >
I am intrigued by this consideration. Is it too complicated for them if there is a big, descriptive sign pointing to a microSD card with a vfat partition of videos named by the dates they correspond to? I had a part in setting up a system that saved files like that and also regularly copied them to a remote server. We used Raspberry Pi with the Raspberry Pi camera because configuring the camera was easy and because we already had the parts. I had wanted to set it up so that we would lose at most a few seconds of recordings if someone stole the camera computer. That is, videos would be simultaneously recorded to files and streamed to the remote server, and internet outages would be handled intelligently. I don't remember whether we actually set it up that way; someone else was more enthusiastic about the project, so I was happy to let him take over.
