zone minder / debian / Streaming issue resolved ?

[phaksp]

found this on google >> http://webbedfeet.net.nz/wordpress/


Lessons learned
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* General

— Neil @ 1:41 pm

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get a motion-based video capture system up and going, based on ZoneMinder on Debian. Been going reasonably well, except that it turns out Linux doesn’t want to use streaming DV over firewire as a V4L source (apparently the DV decoding stuff is too flakey to be kernel-space) and the workarounds are very ugly (userspace decoding with kernelspace V4L loopback driver.)

Gave up using DV and am now using an S-video card with a Philips SAA7135 TV tuner to get the video into V4L so Zoneminder can crunch it.

The other catch is that this system needs to have a Wifi backhaul so me (and others) can access its web interface remotely. It’s going to be in a place with CafeNet coverage, so that’s the obvious way. Negotiations with Citylink to arrange a special WIX-only dataplan, since we only need backhaul back to the University. Citylink pretty much said they couldn’t be bothered with such a low data usage sorta thing, and suggested to simply bridge directly across Citylink on private address space, which I was already considering. Still need to find another Cafenet endpoint to bridge to though.

The client side is now a Linksys WRT54G running OpenWRT c/o Donald, which caused lots of headaches last night. I put it in client-mode and tried to hook it up to my other AP, but could only pass ARP traffic in one direction, nothing else. Turned out my AP’s MAC address filter was somehow still blocking traffic, even though I had cleared it. Oh well. OpenWRT is acting as a router rather than a bridge, as bridging with wifi is difficult due to security restrictions on the cards they use (MAC-spoofing limited.)

During this I discovered some lessons about routing that I should’ve known, for example I needed to add a static route on any PC’s on my network that was going to communicate with the WRT or the video capture system, otherwise the return packets would get routed to my main router, which had no idea what to do with packets for this other subnet (was in private address space, but a different subnet to my main LAN), and so routed them out the cable modem. They weren’t coming back.

All is well now. This is yet another to-do for my projects page.

Well happy new year and all that to those still reading, I’m going out now before the painters come back and start making noise again… Catcha