Can the daemon(s) capture multiple streams and combine them

Halfwalker · Post by **Halfwalker** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 2:35 am

Man, I hate asking what are quite possibly simple questions. I've been reading the docs and the wiki, and I can't seem to figure this one out. It certainly looks like the raw capability is there. BTW - I just found ZoneMinder a couple of hours ago, and it looks tremendously cool.

I don't need the full suite of functionality (though I intend to play with the full deal at home). I'm looking for a way to capture streams from multiple cameras, probably four in all. And then either during capture or post-processing, combine those streams into a single video file, be it avi/mpg/whatever.

By combine I mean that each stream would be one quarter of a larger stream. Say the four cams streamed 640x480 each for sake of argument. The four streams would be combined into a single mpeg at 1280x960, cam1 in upper left, cam2 in upper right and so on. So one could view the resulting video as a single video, correlating the activity from the four cams.

D.

Post by **cordel** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 2:41 am

ZoneMinder can not combine streams and stores all it's captured images to jpegs for each cam.

Halfwalker · Post by **Halfwalker** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 4:25 am

Hrm - perhaps a post-processing setup then ... If the stream from each cam is stored as a series of jpg's, one per cam, then one should be able to combine the images and feed them into an encoder.

Using Imagemagick to montage 4 jpg's at a time to form a single larger one, then feed that list into an encoder ...

If not, any ideas ?

D.

Post by **cordel** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 6:21 am

Certainly sounds plausible but sounds like it would considerably increase the load to what is already a load intensive app. What specifically are you trying to accomplish?
Is this for CCTV cams or IPcams?
Are you wanting to store the original images or just really interested in the quad combined image?

Halfwalker · Post by **Halfwalker** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 2:31 pm

Specifically, I want to capture at least 4 video streams, most likely from USB cams. Definitely not from remote IP cams, nor from CCTV cams (too much $$). I don't really care about the original 4 streams, wanting to combine them into a single larger stream.

This for in-car installation for racing (very amateur). Cams watching rear, front quarters and dash/driver. It's easy enough to capture individual streams, but watching and correlating them is a chore. Combining them into a single quadrant display would things much easier ...

The idea is for a small SBC system in the car with 4 USB cameras attached. It would be nice if we could just produce the single video file as the streams are captured, but after-the-race post-processing would work too.

D.