ZM 1.23-3 + ubuntu and many questions

[il_ferra]

Hello! I'm new to the forum and zoneminder. I found this software very nice and powerful but not so well documented, so here my questions:

I'm running it on an old Compaq Proliant 6400R
-4x PIII 550Mhz
-2.3Gb Ram
-SCSI Disks
-Ubuntu Giusty server 7.10

I bought a 4channels (4 chips) DVR card (no brand printed on ) Doing some search i found that probably is a wave-p Ether9404 card
http://www.wave-p.com/en/productsc-4.htm

FIRST QUESTION:
What about my hardware? Seems to me that my cpus are too slow ... could be? issuing a top command i get 50% cpus usage (2 cpus running 100% !!!)
and my system is capturing from 2 channels (12 fps normally 25 when alarms)
What hardware do i need to properly acquire from 4 or 8 channels assuming a PAL system (25fps)

I loaded the card following this post
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... ht=saa7134
(i want to thank ManRoaming!!)
but if i change the line

Code: Select all

options saa7134 card = 72,72,72,72,72,72,72,72 tuner=4

to

Code: Select all

options saa7134 card = 72,72,72,72 Tuner=4

it doesn't change anything and keeps registering 8 video device.

SECOND How can avoid this behavior? My card is 4 channels only.

Thanks in advance!

[kingofkya]

yeah that cpu is pretty gutless for what zm does try changing to record only and also b/w instead of color also try reducing res and see if you lose a large amount of quality because some times capturing at 640x480 give bad interlacing and has no real gain

also depending how confident you are in your terminal skills you are running take a look at this
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6419

[il_ferra]

Thanks for your reply! Yes my system is quite old but it's a test machine.

How can i determine the power that i need to acquire from 4/8channels? Can't find anything that specifies it like
"For 4 channels @ 640x480 recording you need PIV 2.4GHz 512 MB ram..." and so on. Are there any rules to follow to build an appropriate system?
Can i use an Atom330 based system??

thanks for the link i'll try that library asap.

I'm having a problem setting a monitor function to Record. My system record for a while then stops recording a sentence that the camera is not present (/dev/videoX becomes red). I have to reboot the machine to get that channel back. Nether removing and re-probing the saa713x module nether restarting services solves the problem, i need to reboot.
How can i debug it?

Thanks