SimpleVMS

A network video management system for home and power users. Supports up to 32 cameras on a single node with no transcoding, minimal resource usage, and first-class ONVIF support.

Note: This project is under active development and APIs may change without notice.

Highlights

• Zero transcoding - video passes through as raw data units
• Compressed-domain motion detection - motion vectors and skip flags are read from the H.264/H.265 entropy layer; no frames are ever reconstructed
• Single port access - all native client communication (API, live video, playback, events) multiplexed over one TCP/TLS port
• Plugin-first architecture - capture, storage, formats, analytics, auth, and notifications are all behind extension point interfaces with no privileged internal code paths
• Cross-platform clients - native desktop (Windows, Linux, macOS), mobile (Android), and web UI
• Mutual TLS - clients authenticate with certificates signed by a server-generated root CA; revocation is immediate
• Network-storage-safe - sequential writes, no mmap, no flock; runs directly against NFS or SMB mounts
• CPU-only by default - runs efficiently on hardware without a GPU

Documentation

See the docs/ directory for architecture, deployment, API reference, protocol specification, and more.

Getting Started

Install

Every release ships:

• Server tarball for Linux x64, or the container image via the included docker-compose.yml
• Desktop installers: Windows installer, macOS DMG, Linux AppImage
• Android APK

Build from source

Requires the .NET 10 SDK and Node.js 22+ for the web UI.

./build.sh build     # build
./build.sh test      # run tests

Packaging scripts for each platform are under scripts/publish/.

Run

./out/server/Server
./out/server/Server --data-path /mnt/nas/data

On first run, the web UI at http://localhost:8080 serves a setup wizard to configure the data provider and generate certificates. After setup, discover cameras or add them manually.

See Deployment for Docker Compose, systemd, and other installation methods.

Technology Stack

Component	Technology
Server	.NET 10, ASP.NET Core (Kestrel)
Transport	TCP + TLS 1.3 (SslStream), mutual TLS
Serialization	MessagePack (tunnel framing), JSON (API bodies)
Database	Pluggable via IDataProvider (SQLite included)
Web UI	Vue.js 3 + Vite
Native clients	Avalonia UI + FFmpeg

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on submitting changes, issues, etc.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.