Camera resolution troubleshooting help! [solved]

[krietor]

First of all, I want to express my appreciation to the developers of the Zoneminder system in general, and for those who have been working with packaging it for Ubuntu, and the Live CD guys. It's a great system, and if nothing else so far has really impressed me and my peeps.
Now let me lay out my present problem. I have been tinkering with a surveillance system for the shop where I work. It's working very well so far. Two cameras are recording events continuously, providing security and a good way to help identify people who sell small (stolen) items in our store. We buy, sell, trade DVDs and Gaming systems.
I am experiencing difficulty setting up the Zoneminder camera source to use a particular camera that I have. I had it working before when I was using I think Zoneminder 1.2** a year ago or so. Now, although the camera works fine, producing a nice greyscale picture on a tv when connected to the composite video jack, I can't seem to find a proper configuration setting for zm. I get various sort of multiple-ghost-images, interlaced and overlapping, depending on the resolution settings under camera source.
Take a look at the image from this camera when it's set up with device format AUTO and 320*240 - http://threeeighthsspacer.com/zm_images/320.jpg
And here's it at 640*480 - http://threeeighthsspacer.com/zm_images/640.jpg --
This camera is connected directly to my bttv card with a cable.
Again, thanks for everything, and thanks in advance for any suggestions .

[timcraig]

Try restarting zoneminder whenever you change the monitor setup. Try 320x240 with NTSC and PAL with half the standard PAL resolution (352x288?).

Are there any zoneminder related log events in /var/log/syslog?

[cordel]

First check dmesg, and make sure your card was detected correctly. If you have card=0 then you will have to insmod the correct card type.
Also you are in the U.S. so you most likely have a NTSC cam.
And yes it is a good idea to restart ZM after making these changes so the right amount of shared memory is setup.

There are several other things that of coarse can cause some of these issues, but not enough information is supplied to say for sure.
How are you cameras configured?
What card type is detected?
What card do you have?
Where are your zms files?
What paths for zms do you have configured in ZM?
What path is configured in Apache for the alias of cgi-bin?

[krietor]

Oh, you're right. It does seem to not properly detect the card at first. I thought it "fixed itself" since some cameras connected to that card do work fine under the 320*240 resolution setting, but see, I do have card=0.

Code: Select all

me@vicuna:~$ dmesg | grep card=
[   22.556592] bttv0: using:  *** UNKNOWN/GENERIC ***  [card=0,autodetected]
me@vicuna:~$ dmesg | grep Bt878
[   22.556562] bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:00:0e.0, irq: 21, latency: 32, mmio: 0xef800000
[  118.616310] bt878: Bt878 AUDIO function found (0).

What can I do? Do I want to create a /etc/modprobe.conf file (there isn't one)
and what do I put in it? Hm . .

[cordel]

Sorry I was editing my post to ask more spacific questions but a phone call delayed me submitting the changes

So for your card problem....
What card do you have?

If you don't have a modpobe.conf then likely you do have a modprobe.d folder and you should create a config file under that directory for your bttv card.

[krietor]

The picture was scrambled on just this one camera on the bt878 card.
By the way, I have Ubuntu 7.10. I see some entries here on this forum where James advises the following action in similar cases:

Edit your /etc/modprobe.conf file and add this line:
options bttv card=77

Since I don't have a /etc/modprobe.conf I can't exactly do that, so I wrote “option bttv card=77″ to a new file
/etc/modprobe.d/bttv (and then restarted my machine) as someone suggested on the forum here somewhere. I don't know if that did it, or if perhaps I just hadn't gotten my settings right and then restarted before. I restarted zm after setting the camera to 320*240 with RGB24 and NTSC and then the dang thing started working.
Thanks for your help.

[cordel]

Glad you got it going, altough we just got lucky with card=77 and it just happens that you do have a generic single chip bt878 card in this case, otherwise it may not have worked.

[krietor]

It's certainly been a learning experience. Struggling this way and finally learning something is good, and I have been endeavoring to more thoroughly document my adventures, so that I can refer to my notes later. These posts are also as valuable as gold. For instance, I was able to figure out that there are several revisions of this bt878 card, and decided to try the above manoeuvre based on what I had learned here!
[edit] For the record, I think the scrambled picture I was getting cleared up as a result of setting the video source from grey to RGB32. (doh!) I still have card=0 in my dmesg output.