Skip to main content

What is Crumb VMS

Crumb VMS is a serious video management system for your own security cameras: the recorder, live wall, and scrubbable timeline you would expect from a commercial, installer-grade platform, built to run on your own hardware.

The recorder, storage, and every client are software you run yourself: a Rust backend, a Postgres database, native desktop and Android apps, and a web admin console.

Why it exists​

Cameras at home have been running for years without software that fit. The serious commercial platforms, the kind that run control rooms, are built for professional installers: they are capable but expensive, often cloud-locked or Windows-only, and not aimed at someone who just wants to run their own cameras well. The self-hosted alternatives lean the other way: excellent at object detection, but the day-to-day experience of actually reviewing footage, scrubbing a timeline, and watching a wall of cameras is often an afterthought.

Crumb is the piece that was missing between those two worlds: a recorder with a timeline you can actually scrub across a dozen cameras, including 4K H.265 with no server-side transcode, a multi-camera live wall, fast batch export, and per-camera user roles. It does not try to redo object detection. If you already run (or want to run) an object detector, Crumb is built to sit next to it, not replace it.

That it also happens to be private, no cloud, no telemetry, no account, plain files on a disk you own, matters and is part of the design, but it is the "how," not the "why." The starting problem was simply that the operator experience did not exist yet at this price point.

What Crumb actually does​

  • Records your cameras (RTSP, ONVIF-discoverable) to plain MP4 files on disk, indexed by a Postgres database that is the single source of truth for what exists and where.
  • Plays back a frame-level, scrubbable timeline per camera, with jump to next/previous motion event and digital zoom into a clip, decoded natively on the client (no server transcode).
  • Shows a live wall of multiple cameras at once, with saveable per-device layouts, carousels, PTZ tiles, and on-video ONVIF pan/tilt/zoom control.
  • Retains footage according to named policies (continuous or motion-triggered, size caps, time caps, storage tiers) applied per camera or per camera group.
  • Exports a selected span, or a batch list built up across a review session, to MP4 or an encrypted archive.
  • Controls access with custom roles and per-camera or per-group grants, so a limited account can be restricted to specific cameras or to live-only.

What Crumb deliberately does not do​

  • It does not run its own object, face, or license-plate detection. Detection is left to a dedicated detector you already run (or could run) independently. If you point Crumb at your own instance of one, Crumb will show its detections as icons on the timeline. See Integrations for how that works.
  • It does not require an account, a subscription, or any connection to a vendor's servers. Setup happens entirely on your own network.
  • It does not send footage, thumbnails, metadata, or usage statistics anywhere. There is nothing to opt out of, because there is nothing being sent.

Who this is for​

Crumb is aimed at people comfortable running a Docker Compose stack on a Linux host and editing a configuration file when needed: a home lab, a small property, a workshop. It is under active development by one maintainer. The recorder, the Windows desktop client, and the Android app are the most-used, most-tested paths today; the web console works end to end; the macOS and iOS apps run but are rougher around the edges. See Requirements for what a host needs, and Install with Docker Compose to get a server running.

Before you rely on Crumb for anything, read Responsible & lawful use: recording people, and especially audio, is regulated, and the responsibility for lawful use is always the operator's, not the software's.