Record High-res H264 streams 24/7 with low CPU Load

[trumee]

@iconnor That is great news. Is 1.35 stable going to be released any time soon?

[ernball]

Just a heads up, in 1.35.16 (just pushed to master) we now have a DecodingEnabled setting on each monitor that turns off the decoding. So this script may or may not be necessary anymore.

@iconnor
In record mode with analysis and decoding disabled, I get buffer errors "Buffer too small" etc. I can't increase the buffers to the requested size because they're too large (9GB for 4K cams@ 20fps). If fast, resource friendly recording is the goal of these two new options, disabling buffering altogether and writing the stream straight to disk is preferable, no? If not, the script is still the better option, here.

*** If you've upgraded to 1.35:
The script will fail to create proper filenames due to database column renaming. Replace instances of "StartTime" with "StartDateTime" and "EndTime" with "EndDateTime".

[iconnor]

reduced ram requirements is coming soon.

[bbarnett]

Been playing with this script for a few days, and made some additions. It's a bit rough, but thought I'd post a diff regardless.

Changes:

- record audio on /off toggle
- 'linked monitor' id
- update Events row with 1 alarm frame, if an alarm happens on 'linked monitor'
- insert of 1 frame on start, so you can watch the event via the GUI
- bulk/etc frames inserted upon stream completion
- mysql auth/password in script
- upon start, name='New Event', which then changes to the desired event prefix upon completion

Why the alarm frames, and New Event change? The alarm frames help me with filters + deleting, as I want to keep alarm events longer. New Events text is something else I can filter against, to ensure I do not delete streaming events.

The 1 frame on start allows me to go into Events and start streaming a new event. For whatever reason, I needed this for it to work.

Not sure if further changes are forthcoming, although there is still some tidy up work to do.

[Cramac1]

Hello. Something does not want to be added to my service. Or I misunderstood. How to enable for all cameras?

Code: Select all

# systemctl start zmrecord @ <MonitorID ..>. service
bash: MonitorID ..: No such file or directory

Or do you need each one separately?

[bbarnett]

A second diff. A minor fix.

Frames update/info wasn't done, if a linked camera wasn't provided. Now it is.

[bbarnett]

Hello. Something does not want to be added to my service. Or I misunderstood. How to enable for all cameras?

Code: Select all

# systemctl start zmrecord @ <MonitorID ..>. service
bash: MonitorID ..: No such file or directory

Or do you need each one separately?

The readme.txt shows how to do this. There are examples right at the end of the file.

[bbarnett]

A second diff. A minor fix.

Frames update/info wasn't done, if a linked camera wasn't provided. Now it is.

Another small fix. Sometimes, I'd end up with a 0 prefacing the frame count remainder. This would get interpreted as octal.

[Cramac1]

but did not think how to show an online picture?
tried ffmpeg

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i "'.$cam.'" -b:v 2048k -crf 50  -f mpjpeg pipe:

but it loads the cpu

[bbarnett]

You're not really reading, or at least understanding the documentation here. You might also be thinking this is for something other than it is for.

This might not be right for you.

[Cramac1]

You're not really reading, or at least understanding the documentation here. You might also be thinking this is for something other than it is for.

This might not be right for you.

this is not a question for this script. If you run it, instead of zmс, access to online viewing of the picture from the camera is lost.
Or is it just me?

works view through https://video.site/zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms ?

[xefil]

Hello!
I'm trying to use this script on a zoneminder 1.35.21 setup. I've applied the patched from @bbarnett as well the correction mentioned by @ernball.
BTW I'm getting:

Code: Select all

TS: FPS: BW: FRAME:
ERROR 1366 (22007) at line 1: Incorrect decimal value: '' for column `zm`.`Monitor_Status`.`CaptureFPS` at row 1

Ideas?

Thanks!

Simon

[bbarnett]

Sorry, I'm back on 1.23.

[xefil]

Uh, far away from me. BTW Meanwhile I've noticed that my test cam has not audio, but looking to the vlc stream it seems to have it, so I've added it and now it works, at least in recording. BTW the events are correctly shown in the event view, but they are not shown in the console view.
The console view is not reporting even numbers and not the size as well. I'll look in the script if there are some failed queries.
So the linked monitor is not used correctly as well.
Meanwhile thanks for any suggestion.

Simon

[bbarnett]

Uh, far away from me. BTW Meanwhile I've noticed that my test cam has not audio, but looking to the vlc stream it seems to have it, so I've added it and now it works, at least in recording. BTW the events are correctly shown in the event view, but they are not shown in the console view.
The console view is not reporting even numbers and not the size as well. I'll look in the script if there are some failed queries.
So the linked monitor is not used correctly as well.
Meanwhile thanks for any suggestion.

Simon

Just to be clear.. there are three patches to apply, on top of the initial post.

There was another post about changes with mysql/a new version of ZM, so not sure on that. Also, you are running on the command line? It will help, and show potentially more info. Lastly, there is a debug switch, which I might have used or not (sorry)... and there may be some commented out echos for debugging...