Is zmninja still able to play back events for anyone? How do I get events working in zmninja again?

[Stupid20CharLimit]

At least a month ago, I made the mistake of upgrading to Debian 12 and have been trying to get zoneminder working again on and off ever since. I'm on zoneminder version 1.37.47.

Today I finally got it working well enough to show me live camera feed. I had to delete and then reconstruct the entire zoneminder sql database. Among other issues, zmninja can't view events anymore. I can view live feed in zmninja but I can't view any events. Trying to play a recorded event results in the gray play button screen with a cloud download icon and it just never loads or finishes or plays. Pressing the download button shows "please wait 1%" followed by "please wait 100%" and then it never gives me a file.

I can view events via the web browser just fine. Manually browsing to my videos directory through a web browser results in the videos being unable to play due "mime type" errors. There is nothing useful happening in wireshark while the video is failing to play in the zmninja app too. There's no relevant log output in "systemctl status zoneminder.service", clearing the api cahce in zmninja makes no difference and I've tried deleting all my zmninja config and doing it all over again, both via the wizard and manually multiple times. And of course I've uninstalled and reinstalled zoneminder countless times by now being sure to restart, enable or whatever to all relevant services both before and after. Of course I have also rebooted.

Here's what my zmninja logs look like after clearing logs and then trying to view a recorded event video.

Code: Select all

Nov 26, 2023 06:46:09:842 PM INFO Returning pre-loaded list of 1 monitors
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:09:993 PM INFO EventCtrl called with: E/MID=0 playEvent =  false
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:09:999 PM INFO Image padding digits reported as 5
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:12:559 PM INFO getMonitors:Force reloading all monitors
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:12:729 PM INFO sending stored ZM_MIN_STREAMING_PORT 0
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:12:768 PM INFO Now that we have monitors, lets get AuthKey...
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:12:773 PM INFO Monitor load was successful, loaded 1 monitors
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:12:800 PM INFO multi server list loaded
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:14:601 PM INFO Using stream mode single
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:14:723 PM INFO *** Constructed API for detailed events: http://192.168.1.94/zm/api/events/31.json?
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:16:729 PM INFO >>>Starting checkAllEvents interval...
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:41:227 PM INFO file location:file:///data/user/0/com.pliablepixels.zmninja_pro/files/zmNinjaLog.txt
Nov 26, 2023 06:46:41:265 PM INFO EventModalCtrl: paused

I am completely stumped on this one. Any ideas? Does zmninja work for anyone else right now? Any additional troubleshooting advice?

Edit: also, using the 64 bit linux version of zmninja on the github releases page for zmninja also has the same problem. Huh. Might be a zmninja issue.

[bbunge]

I am happy to report that I am able to playback events in ZmNinja (the old unsupported version). My ZM server is running Debian 12 with ZM 1.37 and has 36 days up time and with a couple of errors in the log some days I have had no problems!
Did you use my install instructions on the WIKI for Debian 12?

[Stupid20CharLimit]

ok well at least this means I don't have to try to do whatever it takes to compile zmninja from the github. I probably will still try it just because.. what else is there to try..? Following the wiki to a T doesn't work so it's just trial and error until I get lucky.

And yes, that has been just about my only resource really and even then I had to do a lot of trial and error just to get to this point. I'm not installing this on a clean Debian 12 installation I'm installing it on a system that got upgraded so of course there's all kinds of problems.

Maybe can you paste your zoneminder.conf and I can replace it into mine? If you really have 1.37 and the old zmninja working and i'm kind of not willing to do a format + os reinstall (yet), maybe substituting known working conf files will fix it. I already tried pasting what the wiki tells you into the conf file for 1.36, didn't work. Using whatever conf files I end up with after apt purge zoneminder and reinstall are also inadequate.

I found a thing. Not very helpful but better than no logs at all I guess. In "sudo systemctl status zoneminder.service", I'm getting an error. Its as follows:

WAR [Telemetry server returned HTTP POST error code: 301]
Nov 27 11:47:47 CrapWagon zmfilter[49156]: WAR [No filter found for SELECT * FROM `Filters` WHERE `Background` = 1 AND( `AutoArchive` = 1
or `AutoUnarchive` = 1
or `AutoVideo` = 1
or `AutoUpload` = 1
or `AutoEmail` = 1
or `AutoMessage` = 1
or `AutoExecute` = 1
or `AutoDelete` = 1
or `UpdateDiskSpace` = 1
or `AutoMove` = 1
or `AutoCopy` = 1
) ORDER BY `Name` with values()]

It might be related to how I had to delete all the "filters" in the filters tab. Well actually first I disabled them and saw I was getting this error so I deleted them and guess what, still getting the same errors. It will always immediately delete every event right after it got saved unless I do this. The update disk usage was returning the wrong amount and I could not figure out any possible way to set or hack it to use the free space of the hdd instead of the 96% full ssd. I couldn't even find where in the github source code that function was, not that I believe I would be able to compile it from source and end up actually getting it to work based on how much trouble i'm having just installing it from the Debian repo.

and if all this really is zoneminder related and not zmninja related, why tf does it work when I view events from the browser? Should I try randomly chmod 777 on some zoneminder related folders? That rarely fixes anything but its not like anyone has any better ideas so I have to really really reach if I ever want to get this working without doing a format and os reinstall.

[bbunge]

Well, the WIKI install for Debian 12 and ZM 1.36 does not use the zmrepo but the version of Zoneminder in the Debian 12 repo. And that install is entirely different from installs done from zmrepo. Your best bet is to reinstall Debian 12 afresh and do the Zoneminder install using the 1.37.x install in the WIKI. It will save a lot of headaches! Messing around deleting this and replacing that will dig your hole deeper. These days with the bandwidth most folks have installing Debian with the network install package can take as little as 15 minutes. That is about what it takes me with my 100/100 FIOS writing to an SSD on an i3 PC.

See: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Debian_12_B ... der_1.37.x

[iconnor]

New desktop packages for zmNinja available

https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zmNinja/r ... g/v1.7.002

[Stupid20CharLimit]

Your best bet is to reinstall Debian 12 afresh and do the Zoneminder install using the 1.37.x install in the WIKI. It will save a lot of headaches!

Yeeeah this is a basement server thing with a lot of stuff I regularly use. It would take ages to get everything back to the way it was and I doubt I could successfully get it all working the same way again if I did that. An OS reinstall is unthinkable right now. I can restore a drive image backup if the system ever borks itself beyond repair but I don't have an image backup where zoneminder worked on Debian 12 otherwise I would've restored that a long time ago. If I can get a virtual machine to run it and do it in a way where I can start,stop and restart it remotely from ssh (and not cost any money at all), I would consider going that option but a reformat and os reinstall is something I absolutely can't do.

iirc zoneminder 1.36 won't even install on Debian 12 for me but maybe I'll try it again.

See: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Debian_12_B ... der_1.37.x

This is literally the only closest thing to a useful resource I've had to go off of. Every time I try to uninstall and reinstall just to see if doing so fixes anything, I follow those. exact. steps.

New desktop packages for zmNinja available

https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zmNinja/r ... g/v1.7.002

Cool, I thought the only way to get that 1.7+ version without compiling it yourself was to pay money. I was not looking forward to the probably difficult process of getting that to compile. I still get the issue when running linux-x86_64 version though.