Lightweight NVR: watches folders, transcodes to H.264/MP4, serves a FastAPI web UI.
Project description
Cang (藏) — Minimal Python Network Video Recorder
Cang (藏, cáng, roughly "tsang" with a rising tone) — Chinese for "to store / to archive". Secondary meaning: "hidden", quietly apt for security footage. The name reflects the project's philosophy: cameras do all the clever work; Cang just keeps what they send.
A lightweight NVR that does as little as possible: cameras handle motion detection and object recognition themselves, deposit video clips and snapshot images into a watched folder, and Cang transcodes, indexes, and serves them through a clean web UI grouped by day and hour.
Inspired by LazyNVR, written in Python.
What it does
- Watches
incoming/<camera>/directories for clips deposited by cameras - Transcodes to H.264/MP4 with
-movflags +faststart(browser-seekable) - Indexes clips in SQLite: camera, timestamp, duration, thumbnail
- Serves a FastAPI + Jinja2 web UI: day → hour view, click-to-play
- Keeps clips marked as important; auto-expires the rest after configurable days
- Runs anywhere Python is available; can also be deployed in a container
What it does not do
- No RTSP / live-stream pulling
- No motion detection or object recognition (delegated to cameras)
- No multi-user roles or cloud sync
Status
[!WARNING] Development paused. Active development is on hold while the project maintainer's Dahua camera is producing glitchy recordings. Testing new features is not practical until the hardware issue is resolved.
Late beta — core functionality (Dahua adapter, transcode pipeline, web UI) is working. See the documentation for installation and configuration.
Licence
Copyright (C) 2026 Marvin8
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
See LICENCE for the full text.
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