Struggling with zm and ip cam

[Dakos]

Hi folks,

I've spent most of the last 48 hours struggling to get going with zoneminder and a YCam White SD. Now it's time to ask for some help! (HELP!!;)

Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition

The camera works great in VLC like this:
http://camera1/stream.asf (640x480 stream)
http://camera1/stream1.asf (320x240 stream)
(The camera also offers /stream.av and /stream1.av which I can't do much with.)

In ZoneMinder, adding a monitor with HTTP camera1 /stream.jpg works very very badly (pathetically slow and minutes behind realtime) - at least it proves something is working!

With the same settings but stream.asf or stream.av the source goes red in the console page and the feed just shows a black screen.

The only information in any of the logs that means much to me is this bit in syslog:

Code: Select all

Feb 10 14:53:18 server zmc_m2[11110]: INF [Starting Capture]
Feb 10 14:53:18 server zmc_m2[11110]: ERR [Unrecognised content type 'application/octet-stream']
Feb 10 14:53:18 server zmc_m2[11110]: ERR [Unable to get response]
Feb 10 14:53:18 server zmc_m2[11110]: ERR [Failed to capture image from monitor 2 (0/1)]
Feb 10 14:53:18 server zmdc[8584]: ERR ['zmc -m 2' exited abnormally, exit status 255]
Feb 10 14:53:23 server zmwatch[8613]: ERR [Can't get shared memory id '7a6d0002', 2: No such file or directory]

That suggests it's getting the stream but doesn't know what to do with it?

Beyond that I don't know where to look or what to do next. Any thoughts anyone?

TIA.


EDIT: Just read the "README" sticky again, some extra notes:
ZoneMinder version v1.24.1
Installed via apt-get
I followed the relevant after-install instructions in the wiki docs
I cranked up the memory settings to the following very large values:
kernel.shmall = 2048000
kernel.shmmax = 4194304000
(The settings in the wiki weren't enough even for stream.jpg to work)

I've searched the forum and googled loads, but I don't really know what I'm looking for. Apologies if this is the same problem that comes up hundreds of times a day!

[Flasheart]

I use several of the ycam blacks, using the mjpeg feed. Works fine both as a <img> tag in html for remote viewing as part of a montage, or with zoneminder.

With zm it was just a case of giving the mjpeg feed from the streams link.

Not exactly sure of the difference between whites and blacks. The black is going to replace several of my Axis 205/206's as it's cheaper and does night vision, and I think it's a good camera.

[Dakos]

Which resolution mjpeg stream are you using? 320x240 or 640x480? How many FPS are you trying to capture? I set it to 10fps on the camera and left the ZoneMinder FPS boxes blank.

For 320x240 I'm finding the recordings are better than the live view. It's creating recordings that are just about useful even though the live view is dire. 640x480 just doesn't work at all.

Not sure what will happen if I add more cameras though as I don't understand where the bottleneck is. And I still think it would be better if I could get the .asf or .av feeds. My main objective is to get 640x480 from 2 cameras with at least a few FPS.

My server is a fairly beefy dual core AMD with 4gb memory, lots of disk space and negligable load. My camera looks fine from VLC or my web browser, so it HAS to be a ZoneMinder configuration problem I'm having.. right?

[xero]

Just in case other people look for a solution to this problem. I found this thread, but didn't see any solution in here.

I had the same error message (ERR [Unrecognised content type 'application/octet-stream']) with zm 1.24.2 trying to read a Linksys cam.

I was using "Source Type Remote", which didn't work with my Linksys cam.

I had to use ffmpeg and additionally compile ZM with ffmpeg and all the av libs.

[TechGuy]

I am pretty sure ZoneMinder does not support asf. The rtsp code relies on ffmpeg libraries. If you can get the camera working with ffmpeg with the avi stream, you can use the builtin ffmpeg support option.

You make also be able to use VLC wrapper to create an rtsp that is compatible with ZoneMinder:

http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13718