Factors that affect hardware requirements

If you’re wondering, ‘How many cameras will my equipment be able to process?’ or ‘Will my Raspberry Pi 4 be able to work with 16 cameras?’, etc. there can be no universal answer to that because the hardware requirements 100% depend on camera specifications and features you are planning to use.

For example, a 1 Gigapix camera will have different hardware requirements than a D1 camera, and a camera that will be using LPR, Face, Text and Emotions Recognition all at once will have different requirements than one that just does live view. All of these factors must be taken into account if you need reliable information.

The system requirements hugely depend on these factors:
a) number of cameras;
b) camera streaming format (MJPEG, H264,…);
c) required cameras parameters (fps, resolution, bitrate);
d) possibility to use dual streaming;
e) how many clients (viewers) will be connected at the same time;
f) what modules (features) will be used. Some features are “heavier” than others (for example, ANPR adds about 10% to the load, etc.);
g) for disk space additionally matters if recording will be used, and if yes, how many hours a day, days a month, etc. the video stream needs to be recorded. Plus, if recording is event-based, an estimation of how often those events will be happening (for example, if motion detection is used, how intense movement is expected to be).

Parallel saving of a smaller copy of archive, introduced in Xeoma starting with Xeoma Beta 22.2.28, will cause bigger disk space requirements. See more here

Each case is unique so it’s impossible to post all combinations on our website. That’s why you can use our online calculator here to get an idea on how powerful your CPU must be to process this or that number of cameras with certain specifications and desired features, and then use this information to compare this CPU productivity to your hardware’s.

If you have both cameras and the device already, the best way would be to test it with Xeoma’s Trial version. If you don’t have something from the list, you could ask the producer of either cameras or the SBC to test Xeoma for you.