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I know you are talking about IP cameras, but you may want to look at what was done here: http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=7799.0 Looks like some work was done to either improve the Motion wrapper or create something new for V4L analog captures to get 25 FPS. Not sure if this helps, but it can't hurt.

These ideas may seem overly complex, but if you put everything into one box with no redundancy and no disaster recovery plan, you are setting yourself up for failure. Now, if you don't really rely on the system, that's another story. For many people, this added complexity would all be a waste of time and money. However, I'm sure most people in the IT industry will agree that when it comes to mission critical, you need redundancy and a plan. All of the software improvements we could come up with won't help in the event of a hardware failure if you have no redundancy. If you want to reduce downtime for a system that could potentially control all of your media, security, climate controls, and lighting (and I'm sure much more), there has to be a way to build in redundant hardware. It would probably be a good idea to split up some of the functions as well, like telecom, security, and media director coordination (and I've heard rumors that it may already be possible to split some things apart).

All of that being said, I'm not suggesting that the people who work on improving LMCE should devote time to building in elaborate mechanisms that, in all likelihood, only a few people will use. I just think its an interesting topic for discussion and something to think about if you really are going to rely entirely on a single box.

I'm interested in this as well. I tried Pluto awhile ago and I have been toying around with LMCE a little bit, but I am afraid to fully commit to the whole house solution because I haven't seen a way to allow redundancy. I am worried that I will devote full control of the house and then the core will die and the family will never let me forget the time when there was "no tv for a week."

On my network right now there is a database server that provides databases for bacula (backup solution), serveral mythtv boxes, zarafa (exchange type mail), etc and it uses a RAID 5 setup with nightly backups to another RAID 5 file server. Is it possible to externalize the LMCE database so that, in the event of catastrophic hardware failure, I could bring another machine online and just tell it to use the same database? Or is there just too much going on behind the scenes to make this kind of thing work?

By the way, thanks to everyone that works on this project. I am truly excited about implementing a whole house solution eventually (hopefully sooner, rather than later).