Unable to Generate Video

[Ruler]

I have a system running ZoneMinder v1.36.33 on Debian 12 that's been operational for about the past 6-8 months. We just had an incident & I have been asked to provide evidence to the police. I isolated the events that we need & have archived all of them, but when I go to generate video for them, the 'Generate Video' button is disabled.

Looking into it, I found that the path to ffmpeg in the config options was being overridden by /etc/zm/conf.d/01-system-paths.conf , so I fixed that. ffmpeg is there and does work, but the button is still greyed out. Giving up, I went on the console and ran zmvideo.pl -e <event id> and was given "Mpeg encoding is not currently enabled". Is this a failure of ffmpeg, something I missed when configuring the system, or have I uncovered a bug?


Slightly unrelated, is there any way to generate video for a series of events, as one would archive/delete them from the list or from a filter? I'm not seeing buttons for this option & while I certainly *can* go into each event manually & generate video for each, it'd be much more convenient if I could find a way to have the system step through the list of events & generate a video for each serially.

Any help is appreciated as the authorities are waiting on this.

[Ruler]

Well, that certainly didn't take long...

Went into zmvideo.pl to see if I could figure out what was being passed to ffmpeg so I could run it manually... and found that the OPT_FFMPEG flag is being checked. Looked in the options and sure enough, RIGHT ABOVE the path to ffmpeg that I've edited half a dozen times so far today is a checkbox to indicate whether ffmpeg is installed or not... First part of my question is solved - I checked this box, hit save, and I'm currently generating videos, albeit one by one.



Appreciate any tips on how to get the system to generate videos for a series of events by itself, primarily because I'm lazy.

[JamesTibiriusKirk89]

Here's how to generate video files in batches: Use the filter functionality.

Once you have identified the time frame, the monitor name you want to look at etc. you create a filter that gets you a list of all the matching recordings. Double check and then check the box where it says "Create video for all matches", then click on "execute". Video generation can take some time depending on your setup. AFAIK there is no progress bar. In general, the system load is going to increase. Once the load is "back to normal" the videos should be done and can then be exported. Again, the filter is your friend. Simply select "export" this time.

Edit:
To generate videos automatically: use the filter function, select "generate video" and create a filter for your criteria, then have it run in the background. However, have a fire extinguisher at the ready, because your CPU is going to melt down.

[Ruler]

Thank you! Never knew that you could generate video from the filter mechanism before... while I had to manually generate the videos for this incident, this knowledge should come in handy if there's an issue in the future.