> But it’s extremely configurable in all the wrong ways

Damn that feels exactly like my experience with Zoneminder. I’m sure it is decent software under the hood, but the UX is downright hostile to anyone who just wants to get IP cameras to do very basic motion detection to record some full resolution footage, which feels like the major, obvious use case that should be optimized for.

I am thankful for OSS existing in this realm, but why do so many solutions make the same mistakes? Am I crazy in thinking that a good out of the box experience is important? Is some critical part of the formula locked behind private walls? Something else? Genuinely curious.

I suspect there’s a tendency by the kind of developers who make fancy open source projects to expose all the awesome nerdy power of their software. Have three different motion detectors? Expose all of them! Make them plugins! Have “extensions”! Have components provide “things!” Make a UI for all of that! It’s especially nifty when the UI looks just like the code structure.

But making a good UI for defining object detection zones is hard, so the very first thing that works at all sticks. Or, once you’ve carefully optimized by using the camera’s built in motion detection and having all the streams you could want, supporting software motion detection is an afterthought, and making it configurable in any useful manner is even more of an afterthought. After all, all the cameras you actually use personally have built in detection that works well and also have so many built-in RTSP streams that you never actually had to optimize for the experience of using a camera with a single stream, a somewhat defective implementation of ONVIF, and entirely unusable motion detection. So you make it work, but only using plugins and extensions, and it never becomes pleasant.