working with LinuxMCE

webpaul1 · Post by **webpaul1** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 10:00 pm

Hi,

I'm the lead developer of LinuxMCE (linuxmce.org). This is a high-end media + smarthome solution with follow-me media, pvr, telephony, home automation and security. Zone Minder looks really impressive. Would you be interested in working together to combine the products? LinuxMCE already has a security cam module, but it's not as sophisticated as zone minder since it's just 1 bullet point out of 50 features. Zone minder focuses on this and a better job. But my guess is a lot of Zone minder's users have high-end homes and would like the total package with media and automation too.

Paul

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 10:15 pm

I cant help much with dev you will need Phil for this, but your right. Im still deciding on pure myth or linux mce. Mce is the boy (love the vids btw) but i havnt had much luck in getting it working on my gear. I havnt tried to hard i must admit
Yes i id love to see a zm plug for mce.

Post by **cordel** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:06 am

It should not be to difficult to do since ZM is already packaged for Ubuntu and in their repo. ZM is also already integrated with Myth as well.

webpaul1 · Post by **webpaul1** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 3:31 am

In order to view the cameras within LMCE's GUI and on the mobile phone, how does that work? Does ZM transcode and stream? Or capture still frames? I've been really swamped and haven't had a chance to learn ZM yet. But how is it integrated into MythTV?

Post by **cordel** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 4:46 am

Everything is still frames, streaming is done with mjpeg via HTML for Firefox naively, or via java for IE using Cambozola.jar.
ffmpeg is supported for streaming but not capture, I'm sure your familiar with it so I will not go into detail. So if ffmpeg can produce it....

I have not, had a chance yet to play with Myth or the ZM plug-in for it, But I think you may have just sparked my interest as this solution (vs Pluto) is simple enough to through one machine together and have a go.
Your demo video is very impressive, so maybe this weekend I'll load one up depending on how fast I get the DVD iso.
Rethinking that.... Maybe I should get the CD versions so I can create a development platform

Post by **cordel** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 6:58 am

Guess I'll have to rethink that, as this is a fork of Pluto. I thought maybe that it would be something more light weight. I personally don't have that much time and certainly don't have the resources/equipment to fiddle with it.

abroz · Post by **abroz** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 8:07 pm

Cordel,

Just my 2 cents...
I've beeing using ZM for now almost two years - and it works (more or less) perfectly - it was a reason for me to go into Linux more deeply.

But since my old PC died in january, I bought PC that now runs 4 camerras in modetect with usage from 0.08 - 0.10.
So I added MythTV, two cards (DVB-T and DVB-S) and this also runs great - in peeks - 0.60.

Now I'm adding Asterisk and want to combine ZM scripts with outbound telephony.

All this time I've been searching for better "All-in-one" solutions.
Pluto - as you have written - is good BUT really hard to figure out - hey I took me 5 days to have stabile ZM on x86_64 Mandriva due tu "new technology" of 64 bit processing.

I do have aDSL, but it's rip-off here - 5Gb a month costs me almost 40$ and every 1G is additional 4.5$ - so downloading LinuxMCE 1, Beta 1 and Beta 2 was, at least expensive to find ot id didn't work as advertised.
But, then I gave it another chance and downlaoded DVD with turn-key solution, put it in VMWare and it did work! Great even!

I will definitly put it in my production machine for a spin on new HDD and if it works with all of my HW (including ISDN BRI card I have) it will be great.
So, for me as a heavy home automation freak (did I forget to mention X10), to have LinuxMCE working with ZM (or vice-versa) - that would be a MAJOR plus.

But - you are right - it has a lot of possible breaking point inside (so many softwre combined is bound to give developers a headache if anything goes wrong) - and I beleive this is "Pluto" error.

For me - the only turning point now is ZM question - I want to have it on my screen, to popup when there is event as PIP while I watch TV (and not to be recorded in TV program if I'm recording it), to call me to my mobile if I'm out, tu turn my TV's on, if somebody unauthorized enters house for him to see his face, etc...

Sorry, if this was long letter, but just wanted to give you my 2 cents...

Regards,
Aj

Post by **cordel** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 11:59 pm

Sure thats fine, but the cost of equipment is far out of my budget. I could maybe peice something together but it would be far from usable at which point it's not much fun and makes working bugs out more than just a slight pain.
Besides, my room is just not that big to have all that lying about.
Then there is the learning curve.
Just because I'm not going to go out and purchace equipment and load it up does not mean that we will not do what we can to support Paul.
We have no problem supporting Paul in his development and intigration with his project, just that our participation might be limited due to our budgets, resources, and time etc.
Besides, Myth already has a ZM plugin, so Paul's work would be the wraper to get intigration and functionality with the system.

bulek · Post by **bulek** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 12:58 pm

Hi,

I guess you'll remember me. I used to help integrating motion under Pluto and at that time we also had conversation about Zoneminder. Since Zoneminder seems really more usable, I'd still like to see it integrated under LMCE now.

But problems are still similar, LMCE is in its infancy stage, few developers have simply just too much to work.

But, since I know LMCE internals pretty much (unfortunately lousy C programmer), I'd just need some help on Zoneminder side to help out with integration. Basically, now LMCE simply uses Motion for taking screenshots (so it sends request and receives snapshot) and then if motion detected two simple messages are sent back to LMCE to report Sensor tripped On and Off events.

So I guess to have such basic support it wouldn't be too hard to do it also with Zoneminder. From this point on, we can add more features on the line...

Can someone explain briefly how this basic functionality could be achieved with Zoneminder ?

We would integrate its web interface also in LMCE's so user could setup up just like having normal Zoneminder installation.

Thanks in advance,

regards,

Rob.

Post by **cordel** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 5:01 pm

You will find that the most usable interface for your wrapper will be through the ZoneMinder.pm perl module. Namely the ZoneMinder::SharedMem I think will get you the most functionality.

bulek · Post by **bulek** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 6:06 pm

Hi,

thanks for info. Is something similar possible from C also ? Maybe some TCP port communication or something.... I guess Perl would be too slow for snapshots (they are displayed live on LMCE GUIs)...

Regards,

Rob.

marv2097 · Post by **marv2097** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 6:08 pm

Ive been having a good read throught the LinuxMCE pages and it seems to be a great system. The one thing that stands out is that it needs a high spec machine with specific hardware to work well. I think one of the reasons a lot of people choose zoneminder is that it can be run on older machines that maybe dont have the power that a MCE core would have.

I am about to build a LinuxMCE machine and give it a test run and I love the idea of it being integrated with ZM but I have reservations of combining a security platform with a media one. What I do think would be a fantastic idea (for me anyway) would be a way to integrate the two systems while keeping them on two seperate platforms. The LinuxMCE could act as a front end for the ZM system in a similar way that others have done with windows. To the end user they would simply see the extra functionality in LinuxMCE without dealing with ZM directly.

Im sure some people would like to have everything running on one platform and I dont see why that wouldnt work too.

Any thoughts on this?

Post by **cordel** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:34 pm

My understanding of the myth plugin (I have yet to actually try it, so I could be wrong) is that it allows ZM to be on a separate system. I Only have one machine with proper hardware to run MCE, but that is my server so that is not going to happen. But you might want to take a look at the Mythtv plugin.

bulek · Post by **bulek** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:59 am

marv2097 wrote:Ive been having a good read throught the LinuxMCE pages and it seems to be a great system. The one thing that stands out is that it needs a high spec machine with specific hardware to work well. I think one of the reasons a lot of people choose zoneminder is that it can be run on older machines that maybe dont have the power that a MCE core would have.

I am about to build a LinuxMCE machine and give it a test run and I love the idea of it being integrated with ZM but I have reservations of combining a security platform with a media one. What I do think would be a fantastic idea (for me anyway) would be a way to integrate the two systems while keeping them on two seperate platforms. The LinuxMCE could act as a front end for the ZM system in a similar way that others have done with windows. To the end user they would simply see the extra functionality in LinuxMCE without dealing with ZM directly.

Im sure some people would like to have everything running on one platform and I dont see why that wouldnt work too.

Any thoughts on this?

Hi,

actually LMCE doesn't have such high demand by it self. You can have simple Core for the heart of the system and have media only clients that must have better graphics. But many users decide to use Hybrid (that means Core + Media Director (which is media client)).

On the other side, LMCE architecture doesn't bind devices by themselves to be on the same IP. DCERouter is software message router on the core and it registers and communicates with "devices" as end nodes regardles where they are...

so I guess there will be no problem in your case...

Cordel: Thanks for a good tip. I think that ZM plugin would be a good place to start....

Since I don't know much about ZM, I'll wait for you guys to start doing anything useful....

HTH,

regards,

Rob.

marv2097 · Post by **marv2097** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 9:29 am

bulek wrote: Hi,

actually LMCE doesn't have such high demand by it self. You can have simple Core for the heart of the system and have media only clients that must have better graphics. But many users decide to use Hybrid (that means Core + Media Director (which is media client)).

Ok so i maybe a little comfused by this, from some of the wiki pages I have read the core needs to do encoding of the data sent to the MDs, so needs to be fairly powerful? How well would ZM sit side by side with this when ZM is doing things like motion detection etc? Which system would be the first to take a performance hit for the sake of the other?

bulek wrote: On the other side, LMCE architecture doesn't bind devices by themselves to be on the same IP. DCERouter is software message router on the core and it registers and communicates with "devices" as end nodes regardles where they are...

So reading http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/DCERouter it seems that LinuxMCE system would work just as well with a remote system running ZM as a local one providing the network connection was up to the task? Also does this mean that more than one ZM system could theoretically be used to scale the CCTV side of things while still having a single UI?