Maybe I am thinking of a stupid idea, nonetheless wanted to share to see if it can be made into a reality, with a lot of work of course.

My main computer is running AbelCam 4.2.0 is Dell Optiplex 755 Core2Duo E7400 (2.8Ghz) with 4GB RAM. I have connected two PTZ cameras to it. A creative live motion and a logitech orbit sphere connected via USB ports. The continuous video feed with occasional motion sensing from both the cameras becomes a cumbersome task even for this PC to process at times. Hence if I am viewing both the camera feeds and interacting withe PTZ the overall computer response becomes quite slow. This is obvious as I can see AbelCam uses a lot of CPU time and utilization.

I had a couple of thin clients lying around with no apparent use at the moment HP T5530/5725/5700 (one is serving as a NAS server for my home network running FreeNAS). I was wondering maybe there can be a bootable self-contained version of AbelCam, of course running any reasonable linux version (mini distros) at its heart, which can be directly installed to the internal disk or external USB on a ThinClient. This version can be a lite or strip down version, which cuts all the added good-to-have fancy features, some basic PTZ and monitoring controls are fine. Hence the cameras can be loaded off from my main pc and a dedicated thin client running the abelcam can serve as a network security appliance.

Of course for configuring or viewing the camera feed we can go on to the web page for video streaming or maybe can open a remote desktop like VNC session to the thin client (depending upon what is offered in this semi-embedded version). Such a version would be a great possibility to use slightly old underpowered hardware as dedicated surveillance devices.

I guess such a flavor can bring huge usability diversity to this extremely useful program currently natively on MS-Windows platform.

Or...just say if the idea was too stupid :-)

Thanks for the comments.