Future hardware options for home setup?

yetirider

What do people think the options are for a four camera home setup?
My mac mini has been running since late 2011, 8 meg of ram and data on an external drive.

Apple don't seem to be updating the mini, i have been thinking of building a hackintosh, put in a decent processor and a few drives.

Is anyone thinking of the future and what options?
I'd like to stay OSX based as the mini has my movies, music and photo's on it and i like SS and Remote Patrol on my iPhone.
A mac pro is out of scope for a few cameras and the UK prices are going skyward.


Cheers Phil

meatsuit

I'm still waiting for a Mac mini update. I'm running a 2014 mini mid level 8 meg ram 2.6 processor with 4 hikvision cams 2-3 mp and 2-4mp all running at the max resolution and frame rate. This configuration would not run very well on my old 2008 iMac. Seems to be stable with the 2014 mini. This mini has a built in h264 decoder built into the onboard Iris video. The load on the processor is not too bad around 15% per cam. I would like to add few more cams but don't thinks it will take the extra load.
I have done a few hackintosh boxes (dell mini 10 and Atx box) I Find that there hard to update and not always stable. Thats why I'm waiting and hoping Apple will release an update to the mini. I don't want to buy a Mac Pro ($2000.) because at that price I might as well buy a dedicated NVR and turn my mini into a media server.
-Tighe

Ben

It's such a shame that the Mac mini has been somewhat neglected by Apple: limited to dual-core and not updated for two years now. It's still very useful for small to mid-sized SecuritySpy installations, but it could be so much more capable than it is. My recommendation would be to obtain one of the quad-core 2012 Mac mini models second hand (e.g. eBay). Being quad-core, they are much more powerful than the current lineup. Hopefully in the near future Apple will give this product the attention it deserves.

BrianM

I have 6-7 cameras running on a 2012 Mac mini Quad i7 2.3 Ghz with VTDecoderXPCService using 15-17% for all of the cameras, and Security Spy itself using another 15% . so a combined approx 30% of one CPU If you are seeing that much load per camera, check your settings and turn of things like overlay text (set it up on the camera instead) it reduces load by quite a bit.

meatsuit

I was at 5%-7% per cam when running the cams at 1920x1080, 15fps. When the SS 4 upgrade got stable i started to max out the resolution and frame rates of my cams 1 at a time. Now I'm at 12%-15% per cam at (2688x1520 4Mp) (2048x1520 3Mp) 20fps. Have Video Quality to highest, I Frame Interval is 60, Smoothing is 1, SVC is off, Digital Noise Reduction is 50, OSD setting all done by cam, Sub streams are also maxed out. Have been tweaking and testing the cam setting and have everything running well. I'm enjoying the Hi Def and fluid motion. Would love too lower the system load for future cams. I'm sure this is possible if lower my cam setting. When i get around to it i will buy another cam, run some cable and give Ben a $100 for a bigger license:) Will see how it goes. Open to suggestion and insight.

1-DS-2CD2342WD-I
1-DS-2CD2142FWD-IS
2-DS-2CD2032F-I
2014 Mac Mini 2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 8Gb Ram OS X 10.11.6
TP Link TL-SG1008PE 8 port poe switch
Buffalo's Drive Station 4TB USB3

BrianM

In Preferences -> Device is it set to "recompress video data from this device"? if so Uncheck that (same for audio)

your camera's are higher resolution than mine... my best is 2MP. So it's possible the much higher resolution takes way more CPU load, but it still seems like it is much higher load than it should be.