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scottlamb
moonfire-nvr
Rust2016–2025
scottlamb / moonfire-nvr

moonfire-nvr

Moonfire NVR, a security camera network video recorder

Web DevelopmentSystems & InfrastructureSecurity & PrivacyCreative & MediaNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
32Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Moonfire NVR, a security camera network video recorder

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year32 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-12-27 05:52:55 UTC to 2025-10-24 16:37:24 UTC.

02462016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
scottlamb·Nov 18, 2023
> I’m currently thinking of moving over to continuous recording, perhaps trying out moonfire-nvr or mayhaps handwriting a gstreamer pipeline. Simple software -> fewer failure modes. Moonfire's author here. Please do give it a try! Right now it's a little too simple even for me, lacking any real support for motion or events. [1] But I'd like to keep that simple server core that just handles the recording and database functionality, while allowing separate processes to handle Frigate-like computer vision stuff or even just on-camera motion detection, and enhance the UI and add stuff like MQTT/HA integration to support that well. I'd definitely welcome help with those areas. (And UI is really not an area of expertise of mine, as you can see from e.g. this bug: <https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/issues/286>.) For now I actually run Mo
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onfire and Frigate side-by-side. They're almost complete opposites in terms of what they support, but I find both are useful. [1] The database schema has the concept of "signals" (timeseriesed enums like motion/still/unknown or door open/door closed/unknown), but my code to populate that based on camera or alarm system events is in my separate "playground" of half-finished stuff, and the crappy UI for it is rotting in one of my working copies. I'd like Moonfire's database/API layer to also have a more Frigate-like concept of "events" and one of "object tracks".
In Frigate: Open-source network video recorder with real-time AI object detection
scottlamb·Nov 9, 2023
Maybe, but (and I say this as the author of an NVR [1]) security cameras only accomplish so much. It helps that in this case Amazon/etc. theoretically knows who opened your garage so with their cooperation (not a given), you should be able to match the video to the suspect, but even then it may not provide the expected standard of proof much less get your stuff back... [1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/
In Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
scottlamb·Oct 23, 2023
How do folks test timing-related stuff with MSW? AFAIK, MSW doesn't get along with jest.useFakeTimers. It drives me nuts; I have a bunch of disabled tests in an open-source project and at least one that is flaky because it uses real timers where I'd like to be using fake timers. [1, 2] I've been thinking about ripping out MSW from my tests in favor of my own API-level mock for this reason. But it seems like many other folks are happy with MSW. I have to assume there's something I'm not getting. I'm a fish out of water with frontend stuff in general... [1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/5ea5d27908f1a... [2] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/5ea5d27908f1a...
In MSW 2.0 – Mock Service Worker
scottlamb·Oct 8, 2023
> I wonder how hard it would be to run your own streamer pipeline or whatnot on these things? Agree with the_biot: The actual streaming component is not too hard. If this were the biggest problem, I'd be thrilled to contribute to (or just write) an open source streaming server to complement my open source NVR. [1] The driver situation is indeed a bit harder—these things don't just have mainline Linux support with v4l2 for the video capture and encoding. Or open source drivers of any kind to crib from AFAIK. The biggest problem IMHO is that there just aren't any good cameras to buy, even completely ignoring the software aspect. I want a camera that: 1. doesn't support genocide. Nothing that involves Dahua, Hikvision, or Huawei. See IPVM articles on the subject. And a lot of available cameras are relabeled Dahua/Hikvision stuff and/or use H
Read the rest
uawei components. 2. is legal for sale / authorized for use in the US. (See the Secure Equipment Act of 2021.) Mostly this excludes the same companies. 3. has good night mode performance: IR/day switch, a sensor that is at least 1/1.8", reasonable resolution (somewhere from HD to 4k). 4. has an "eyeball" or "turret" form factor rather than "bullet". The latter seems to really attract spiders, so you end up with a really nice video of a web... 5. supports PoE. 6. is weatherized (IP54 or so). 7. is reasonably priced. If you ignore #1 and #2, there's some nice hardware out there, but I'm not willing to do that. If you ignore #3, there are a few options (GeoVision, maybe Reolink, maybe Hanwha.) If you ignore #4 and #7, there might be a couple (Axis, maybe Hanwha.) Nothing that ticks all the boxes. Hard to get excited about investing a lot in the software when the hardware isn't there. [1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr
In OpenIPC: Alternative open firmware for your IP camera
scottlamb·Jan 10, 2023
Still depends. As it happens, I'm developing my own open source NVR software, [1] so I know a bit about this. Some cameras are fairly good about this, supporting the following features: * "Temporal SVC", in which the frame dependencies are structured so you can discard down to 1/2 or 1/4th of the nominal frame rate and still decode the remainder. * Three output streams, which you could configure for say forensics (high-bandwidth/high-resolution/high-fps), inference (mid-bandwidth/mid-resolution/low-fps), and viewing multiple streams / over mobile networks (low-bandwidth/low-resolution/mid-fps). * On-camera ML tasks too. (Although I haven't seen one that lets you upload your own model.) But other cameras are less good. E.g. some Reolinks [2] only support two streams, and the "sub" stream is fixed at 640x352, which is uncomfortably low. You
Read the rest
r inference network may not take more resolution than that, but even if not, you might want to crop down to the area of interest (where there's motion and/or where the user has configured an alert) to improve quality. (You probably wouldn't pair that cheap Reolink camera with this expensive inference card, but the point stands in general.) Even the "better" cameras' timestamp handling is awful, so it's hard to reliably match up the main stream, sub stream, analytics output, and wall clock time. Given that limitation it'd be desirable to just use the main stream for everything but the on-NVR transcoding's likely unaffordable. [1] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr [2] https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/wiki/Cameras:-Reol...
In AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card

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