Shinobi

Shinobi is a modern, Open Source NVR (Network Video Recorder) written in Node.js. For personal or educational use, the Pro version does not require a license key. See this page if the intended use is for commercial purposes.

A note about h.265 video

ノート: Cameras supporting h.265 cannot be viewed in browsers on the Shinobi Dashboard. Recording (copy video) will still work but if the intention is to use a browser to view, this is not possible. One can use the mobile app to view these streams.

Installation

Install shinobi-git^AUR and ffmpeg-shinobi^AUR. Users of Arch ARM may simply install with pacman as these two packages are provided in the official repos.

警告: One can alternatively use ffmpeg but there are known incompatibilities with version 4.4 of ffmpeg which introduce CPU saturation so it is highly recommended to use the aforementioned AUR version.

ノート: Shinobi will be running as a non-privileged user so a few limitation are imposed as a result:

Installation of plugins from the webUI will not work. Manually start the server as root if these are needed.
The restart feature from the webUI will not work since pm2 is not being used.

Setup

Install and set up the MariaDB server

Refer to MariaDB#Installation for initial setup, then to create a database for Shinobi, use the following commands:

$ mysql -u root -p
   <<enter the mariadb root password assigned in the first step>>
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE ccio; flush privileges; \q

Setup Shinobi

Create the user and setup database framework: First substitute 127.0.0.1 with the LAN IP address of the server. For example, if this is 192.168.9.100:

$ sed 's/127.0.0.1/192.168.9.100/g' < /usr/share/shinobi/sql/user.sql > /tmp/user.sql
# mysql < /tmp/user.sql
# mysql ccio < /usr/share/shinobi/sql/framework.sql

Next, edit /etc/shinobi/conf.json changing both instances of 127.0.0.1 to match the actual IP address of the server.

Optionally setup the mail section accordingly as well as replacing the cron key with something random as indicated in the comments.

Optionally change the the super admin password by editing /etc/shinobi/super.json and replacing the value for "pass" with an md5sum hashed password. Generate one like this:

echo -n PASSWORD | md5sum

Start and Enable shinobi. Browse to http://192.168.9.100:8080/super to perform initial setup including creating a user/users. See the official configure guide for a walk-through. Once finished, browse to http://192.168.9.100:8080 and log in as the non-admin user.

Android and iOS apps

Shinobi Mobile Apps for both Android and iOS are available though this public test.

Resources

Shinobi docs - Official docs and guides.
iSpy camera database - Large database of URLs for various cameras.
Shinobi camera database - Searchable database of supported cameras including things such as protocols, URLs for streams, and other technical specs.
Home assistant camera database - Another resource for finding URLs for streams.