Recording video feed from an IP camera over a network

Question

I am building a camera security system for my office however we do not want to keep the DVR on site.

We looked at NVR (network video recorders) and they are too expensive. I thought of an alternative to this. I do not know how much feasible it is but would surely like some inputs here.

Here are my thoughts :

1. Buy a regular IP camera
2. Buy a server or an AWS instance and write a program to download the streaming feed continuously to the server.

Now I have some questions about the practicality of this solution and the technicalities involved with building such a system :

1. What format do most IP cameras stream feeds in ? What frame rates are they transferred at ?
2. If i were to write a program that could read this feed and download it and store it on a server, will I get the same quality as a live feed ?
3. Will I need to again encode the data realtime to some other format (like flv.) before i store it ?
4. Can you suggest a best possible architecture for this ? I was thinking an amazon instance and s3 for storage of video feeds.

There are some sites which already do this (like http://www.mangocam.com/)

Thanks and I hope this question meets the SO guidelines since this might be a gray area between programming and non-programming related. If not, I'll move it to some other stackexchange site (suggestions please)

Answer 1

I haven't used it yet but I would take a look at http://www.zoneminder.com/ The documentation explains you can install it on a modest machine with linux and use IP cameras for remote recording.

Andrew