No Event Playback Without Camera Restart

[mfitch]

Hello!

I have an odd problem that has been going on for a long time and through multiple versions of Zoneminder. I think it's a problem with my camera but I wanted to ask the experts here.

After "a while" (not sure how long) I can no longer play back events captured in ZM in either the web UI or the ZM app. I can download events and they still don't play back in VLC, but oddly they do in DragonPlayer (a Linux multimedia program). Live stream works fine, movement detection works fine, capturing the preview still frame from the event works fine, etc. Only the playback breaks. When I reboot the camera the issue is resolved temporarily (probably a couple days).

I don't even know what to check or which logs to provide. This even occurs after restarting ZM and persisted when I upgraded minor versions to ZM (1.36.24 -> 1.36.33) until I rebooted the camera. Obviously the camera is the issue. Any thoughts?

Thank you!

[dougmccrary]

So there's no indication in the logs? When it goes bad, is it around the same time of day? You do a software restart, or power off?
I'd verify or replace the power supply, and google for issues with your particular camera, whatever it is.

[iconnor]

Yeah check logs. This is suspicious.

Perhaps you can attach an example of a bad video here, or send to isaac@zoneminder.com.

[mfitch]

Yes, oddly there is nothing in the logs that I can tell. I don't have any debug logging on so maybe that would help? Any advice on which functions I should turn on?

I do a software restart on the camera. I couldn't find anything with my Googling (duck duck go ing really) for my camera but came up empty. I think it's telling that the video refuses to play in VLC; but I can't explain why it plays in another video application (Dragon Player). I don't know much about video files so maybe there's some corruption in the way the videos are made? I do have a few custom settings in ZM:

ZM Options:
FFMPEG_INPUT_OPTIONS = -vsync 2 -fflags +discardcorrupt+genpts
FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS = -r 25

Camera Options:
Source Type = Ffmpeg
Source Path = rtsp://...
Method = tcp
Target colorspace = 32 bit
Image Buffer Size = 3
Maximum Image Buffer Size = 135
Warmup Frames = 5

I can't remember why these custom settings were necessary but I think it was something about a delay in the video. My camera sends video already in H264 1080P with 10 FPS

[iconnor]

How are you actually saving the video? Encoding or Passthrough?

The frames in the file have no pts, which is timestamp so it doesn't know when to play that image. I assume dragon player is just making it up as is goes.

[mfitch]

It's "Camera Passthrough", but I do have this option which I guess probably does nothing since it isn't encoding:

movflags=frag_custom+dash+delay_moov

Not sure if it's important but "save jpegs" is disabled. Hmm, maybe it's just a fault with this particular camera? Just a camera that I got from Amazon a number of years ago. It's been like this for a while, but not always so I have no idea what could be wrong. Maybe it's something I did with the settings in ZM since those are preserved through upgrades.

[iconnor]

Well you could try removing that custom setting.
Our defaults these days are frag_keyframe+empty_moov+faststart. it does have an effect even in passthrough as it is telling ffmpeg how to structure the mp4.