i need to setup an open source surveillance system for a friend. does anyone have any experience doing this under gentoo? it needs to publish video streams via http to get to smart phones on outside world. motion alarming would be good too. i found zoneminder and that looks good, but i need advice on the hardware for cameras / cards to linux. id prefer bnc stuff.

Hi

Unluckily nobody will be able to give you a good hint about cameras/cards as the producers tend to change chips inside the same models - it's too complex.
I would give you the advice to stay on low-budget level and buy 3 or 4 of your best candidates and see if they work.

I did something similar in the past: at that time the biggest problem of zoneminder (which is potentially really cool) was the compatibility with the cams => none of the ones I had worked with that SW.
I ended up using the "motion" SW (http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome) software to track the changes using a normal webcam and triggering the scp-upload of the pictures/movies to my remote server - quite nice, especially as this way you decouple the place where the pics are taken and the one from which you watch them.
You could consider this alternative, especially if the HW you use is not powerful enough to run zoneminder.

Btw., (I think that) all webcams have an infrared filter in front of the camera sensor => if you remove it / scratch it away and use an infrared LED lamp you can watch in the dark without emitting visible light - same thing as the professional infrared cams but a bit more "low-budget" => you'll get slightly unfocused objects as the lens for normal light are slightly out-of-focus for the infrared light spectrum.

Cheers

I use to use wxcam and a $3.99 web cam i got at a close out store for motion detection and it worked satisfactorily. wxcam does good motion detection. I use slackware btw.