ZoneMinder Forums

Here is what we ended up doing. It is kind of cool really. We used the webcam for motion detection and then took high res pictures when there was some motion. I really think a camera could be programmed to use the viewfinder mode to look for motion and then take pictures. Somebody ought to do that ...

One idea would be to use a cheap webcam to detect motion and then when there was motion use a 10 MP snapshot camera to take some pictures too. So the total number of pictures from the 10 MP camera could be kept low enough that it did not break too fast. May try this.

The problem seems to be that these cameras have lots of moving parts. Iris/aperture control zoom focus lenses come in for compact shape when not in use etc. It is not clear you can turn off all of these things on any of the snapshot cameras and still take good pictures. If anyone knows of a cheap ...

So it seems standard for snapshot cameras to open and close a shutter with every picture. If you take a picture every second or so your camera will not last very long.

It seems with Canon it is possible to leave the shutter open using software at:

http://capture.sourceforge.net/

I have a Sony MVC CD400, which is not listed as supported but I tried it anyway. The command is just: gphoto2 --capture-image But it is not supported on my camera. I was able to copy images off. But I think this should work on the A550. With some of the cameras you can capture the image and send it ...

http://gphoto.wiki.sourceforge.net/Capture

This says that gphoto is able to capture from lots of Canon Power Shot cameras. It does not list the one I ordered, but this looks like good news to me.

It seems like it should be possible to use regular still cameras with a USB port from zoneminder. Is this possible? Is it common? There is a "Picture Transfer Protocol" which still digital cameras use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Transfer_Protocol Linux seems to support PTP: http://en ...

I am running 6 cameras at 640x480/5fr/sec and the amd 4000 can just keep up. Any faster and it drops frames. I would need an X2 or an Opteron to go any higher. Thanks much! That is the kind of info I was looking for. Not knowing anything more I will assume load is based on total number of pixels ...

I like the idea of 5 megapixel cameras but am worried that motion detection and the rest of the processing could not keep up with 2 cameras. Does anyone have experience with this? What camera/resolution were you running on what CPU/computer and frame-rates/load did you see?