hardware gripe and question bout vnc...

eddyhkim · Post by **eddyhkim** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 10:02 pm

first the gripe, directed at no one in particular.

I've got about 5 systems using geovision cards/software but I'm quite unhappy with their operation and closed nature. Plus they're windows only. If they had linux versions, I'd probably put up with their crappy designs.

As it is, i've been hoping zm would be my way out of gv hell. however, the 4 port no-name korean card, and the 4 port kodicom 4400 i recently bought cant be made to work (by me at least) on gentoo, debian sarge 3.0 or 3.1 or mandrake. i've tried the live cd as well. I know the first card works because i used it before i dumped it for the geoview systems. argh. just venting..

now for my question. Does anyone know anything about vnc recording and zoneminder? I've found a few matches on google re: vncrec and i'll be looking into that, but has anyone tried to or wanted to integrate that as a zoneminder stream?

The use I have in mind is loss prevention in a retail setting. i have a small business that watches the register from above, but the resolution and frame rate isn't good enough to see what is being put into the POS system. VNC viewer can show that, but it would be really cool to have it syncronised with the other camera shots that zoneminder is saving.

mind you, i haven't actaully gotten zm to work yet due to hw problems but i'm just putting this question out there. maybe there are other there with the same use in mind, that would like to discuss their setups and how it's working out for them.

Thanks,
Ed

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 10:16 pm

your 4400r needs at least a 2.6.13 (possible on 2.6.12) kernel and the live cd is 2.6.7. You will also need a modified modprobe card=133,132,133,133.
Your vnc idea intreages me and yes should be possible, and would also be killer to see working! but the resolotion could be an issue and so would framerate but i suppose the motion detector could be set sensitive enough. I will have a look to see what i can find out too, let me know if you get anywhere

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 12:39 am

Right then (must stop doing this) I loved your idea so much i have written a small proof of concept alpha/beta. Its a .net2 app so you will need the framework
Basically it svaes the currebt screen to a jpeg file called c:\viseon\screen1.jpg
If you dont have a folder on your c drive called viseon you will need to create it.
This app will then save the screen every 1 second. I then used a webserver to serve the particalur file for zm purposes and created a monitor in my zm box to grab the relevant jpeg and it works. Obviously it needs more work but its definetly proof of concept lol.

I used the cassini ASP web server cos its little but i suppose you could use apache or iis.
http://www.ultidev.com/ is the webserver i used

and my app is at
http://217.154.38.122:8080/screengrabber/

Let me know if this is what you were thinking of!

Regards
James

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:24 am

Update i think it needs to grab screens at fps so i have modified the code. Plus there was a share error on the posted app if the webserver and my app access at the same time an error occurs.
We also need to think of file sizes as my desktop is 1280x1024 and although its fine for windows to create jpegs of this size and frequency (it has mmx/sse2 etc) its gonna put a hell of a strain on your zm box. I have done a scale down to half the size but this will need interpolating if its to be anyuse. Maybe this is a bad idea as i would think most pos's use a low res anyway and we it might be bad to miss something little so capture at full res? Anyway well early days, and im off to bed
Regards

James

eddyhkim · Post by **eddyhkim** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:31 am

I don't have a working system to safely test it on, so I'm afraid I cant give direct feedback on the work you just did just yet. Wow that was quick though.

If I understand how you're doing this, it's using a local webserver to do local screenshots? If so, it probably would narrow down the number of people who could use it in a production environment. Here's why I think that:

Unless you use a full blown PC, most computers used in retail are a bit underpowered in both cpu and memory. At least for the configurations I've got, I'd be wary of running a webserver on the pos machine since it's truely mission critical. If it crashes, slows down or otherwise bugs out, I'm literally losing sales by the minute. Whats your experience with that application server? If the footprint and cpu cycles are very low, this implementation just may work.

I was thinking a vnc server in listen only mode, since it seems a bit less heavyweight than a webserver. On the vnc client end, the data coming across should be pretty compressible, so hopefully it would be space efficient.

I've heard of systems where you can hook up the output of the receipt printer to the video input. I forgot what those were called, but basically you'd see the video generated from the receipt printer superimposed on top of the video stream. Unfortunately it's not discrete data so it's not searchable, and I don't think it would work in all situations. And they're a bit pricey at $500+ for one box.

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:44 am

well the webserver that im using has a very small footprint
Its currently serving at 2 fps a 1280x1024 jpeg using 30meg of ram and 2% of proc.
My app is using 12 meg and 22% so that will have to drop lol
Regarding POS it should be quite easy to get the serial output into zm but its a first. I looked at doing it a bit ago but gave up due to being to lazy. I like the screen recorder idea as its so general purpose! but yes it will be heavier on hardware as somethng needs to get the images of the screen. If i can find a lighter way to get the images out of the pc then i will but this was just a first hash to see if it flew. I wanted to 'borrow' some webserver code but couldnt find any quick enough to do it 'now'.
VNC isnt that light to be fair and wont help you get the images into zm. It would be a lot easier to write the app so it just took snapshots and saved them to a central file server but if your grabbing 1280x1024 images twice a second and start throwing them round in code you are gonna notice it im afraid. What res you running at? and maybe another way would be to get one of those vga to video converters and pipe it straight into zm without any load on your POS terminal.

Well done for getting my imigination fired lol

James

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:47 am

Maybe another ligfht way would be to forgo the web server and just save the images straight onto the zm box via samba and for it to get the images from there. We would have write issues mind but it might be worth exploring, or we just dump them to 10 min segs via samba on the zm machine, somehow overlay time and date onto them and possibly convert to mpeg with ffmpeg to save space but its still gonna use some proc cycles up

eddyhkim · Post by **eddyhkim** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 2:11 am

jameswilson wrote:Maybe another ligfht way would be to forgo the web server and just save the images straight onto the zm box via samba and for it to get the images from there. We would have write issues mind but it might be worth exploring, or we just dump them to 10 min segs via samba on the zm machine, somehow overlay time and date onto them and possibly convert to mpeg with ffmpeg to save space but its still gonna use some proc cycles up

<slaps forehead> I hadn't thought of that. sounds pretty simple too.

you're probably right about the vnc not being so lightweight. however the nice thing about vnc is that i can view it remotely realtime right now, so it actually came in handy in catching some things (people).

Thanks for all the great discourse. I hope to have some more time to play around with zm in the near future and get it working. Then we'll see what we can do about integrating all these great ideas you've got.

Regards,
Ed

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 11:53 pm

Just an update on this in case anyone else is interested, I have made the interpolation thing work to reduce file sizes and the default scale down is now 70%. this makes a 1280x1024 desktop a 60 ish K image. If this idea is to progress i need to improve the way zm gets the images as the leaks are now fixed, but i will stop development on this unless either
a) I get a request for this from a client or
b) one of you puts in a request

Anyhow cheers

Post by **cordel** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 4:37 am

They also make a serial device that will inbed the text over a camera image that works nicely.
http://www.supercircuits.com/index.asp? ... rodID=4435

Corey

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 8:10 pm

I really must give up on this lol. I have been looking at adding my own webserver to the app but its a mega job and way above me at the moment. I think this idea could run as i have been thinking of only grabbing part of extending this into a seperate app. I was thinking of a pos software app (windows only) that would read the screen and grab video form a local webcam or ip camera (maybe bttv boards too) and then server this overlayed screen to zm. There are issues with this idea and the previous working one. Share violations
Basically if zm requestes the image from the webserver at the same time my screen dump app writes to the file then we have an error. I can handle this in my app but obviously apache (etc ) i cant. Now if anyone knows of any realistic way to achieve this then i will modify the code. I think the only way this can work is if the windows app stores the jpegs in the correct format in the correct places and enters the data into mysql, so that zm knows its there (I suppose thats a use for nodect or none). But you wouldnt be abole to see alive stream. What i ideally need is an image server that when zm requests an image, grabs the screen and sends it to the zm server. I will probably know how to do this in 10years but now alas i dont! Anyway just thought id post an update!

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Apr 18, 2006 10:33 pm

as above!
I decided that the webserver approach and saving a graphic was floored. Si i have wriiten a little asp thingy that does the above but requires iis5 and up. This means win 2k minimum. I think all my app are win 2k min anyway cos of the .net 2 framework. So this works like zms does and is basically a streaming companent that requires a webserver specifically an ms webserver! As it now generates screengrabs on demand it works at the framereate set in zm so anything as normal. I have notice though that grabing a 1280x1024 screen shrinking it abit and interpolating the result so that its readable, results in a 75K file size and a max of about 5fps. I think that 1-2 is sufficient though. Plus im thinking that zm is pretty damn efficient without mmx considering the load a windows box gets put under soing this. It aint light but its not heavy at 1 fps with the above compression etc am runnign at less than 20% cpu (17%) and about 36 Mb
2 fps = 36% and 37 Mb
3 fps = 53% and 37Mb
4 fps was not achievable as it sat at 3.11 fps. This may be cos of my 10Mbs 'Hub' that i run my internal lan on or my main windows pc was out of power (ahem fx53 with 2 gig of ram)
I will have to test it on some more modest hardware!

smiffy · Post by **smiffy** » Sat May 13, 2006 11:22 am

jameswilson wrote:your 4400r needs at least a 2.6.13 (possible on 2.6.12) kernel and the live cd is 2.6.7. You will also need a modified modprobe card=133,132,133,133.

I've just stared with ZM and have the 4400R card - on a system built by the ZMLiveCD_1.21.3 - as my kernal is 2.6.7-2.tmb.6mdk
- how do I upgrade this to support my 4400R card?

thanks

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Sat May 13, 2006 1:00 pm

I have never managed to upgrade the kernel on the live cd as it always barfs soemthing. Please see your other post