Requirements

Host

• Operating system: Linux, x86-64. The stack is Docker-based, so any distribution that runs a current Docker Engine works.
• Docker + Docker Compose v2. Check with docker --version and docker compose version. Confirm you can run Docker without sudo (docker ps), or plan on prefixing compose commands with sudo.
• Disk space. Cameras consume terabytes over time. Estimate from camera count, resolution, and how long you want to keep footage, and point the media path at a disk with real headroom. Storage is a broad root directory that both the recorder and the API mount; adding a second disk later is a matter of mounting it under that root and adding the path in the admin console, no reinstall needed.
• Network. Cameras and the Crumb host need to be reachable from each other, normally the same LAN. Clients (desktop, Android, the browser) also need to reach the host's HTTP port and, for live RTSP playback in native apps, the RTSP port.

GPU (optional)

Not required. Motion detection runs on CPU by default (MOTION_HWACCEL=auto), and recording itself is never re-encoded (-c copy straight from the camera), so no decoder is needed for recording at all. Hardware-accelerated motion decode is an opt-in overlay for Intel/AMD iGPUs (VAAPI) or NVIDIA GPUs (NVDEC); see Hardware decode.

Cameras

• RTSP-capable IP cameras. ONVIF support lets the setup wizard's discovery step find cameras and read their stream URLs automatically; cameras without ONVIF can still be added by hand with a known RTSP URL.
• H.264 or H.265 are both supported for recording (no server-side transcode); native clients decode H.265 directly.

Images: pull or build

The default install path pulls prebuilt api and recorder container images, so no Rust toolchain is needed on the host. That depends on the project owner having published images for the repository or fork you are running; if docker compose pull reports the images can't be found, the build-from-source override handles it instead, still with no local Rust toolchain required (the compile happens inside the build container). See Install with Docker Compose for both paths.

Clients

Each native client has its own minimums:

Client	Minimum
Web console	any modern browser, nothing to install
Windows desktop	Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
Android	Android 8.0 or newer
macOS	macOS 13 (Ventura) or newer
iOS	iOS 16 or newer (not yet distributable, see iOS)
Linux desktop	build from source (see Linux desktop)

See Clients for install steps and current status per platform.