The Future

[zoneminder]

Hi all,

Contrary to a lot of speculation ZM is not dead, it's just resting (and not nailed to the perch). Work has been going on behind the scenes on the next couple of versions. Whilst I have not had enough time to spend on a full release, it has been far too long since the last updates. This is the schedule I am hoping to stick to for the immediate future.

Over the Xmas and New Year period I will be releasing 1.24.3. This will be pretty much a wrap-up release including the new functionality that has been trickled out in SVN over the last few months, including various contributed patches such a iPhone skin and such like. I would hope that this would be the last release in the 1.x.x stream though it is entirely likely that a further fix release may be necessary shortly after.

I have already begun working on a 2.x.x version though I don't currently have a release date. A lot of the code and options is there to support old or legacy features which are less relevant nowadays but which make maintaining the codebase more fiddly than necessary. Thus the 2.x.x core will ditch a lot of the legacy code for ancient or rarely used features. Also many of the options available were included to allow fine configuration but for the most part the defaults are fine. The 2.x.x release autodetect a lot more about it's environment and so make configuration a lot simpler. Finally 2.x.x will simplify greatly architecturally and will have ffmpeg much more at it's core. This will enable ZM to leverage on advances in that project and reduce duplication where ZM and ffmpeg both include code to do the same thing. As well as all this ZM2 will have many new features including multiple event types, H.264 as a storage options as well as streaming in and out, Flash compatible real-time streaming and a plugin architecture, hopefully mostly by the first release.

As well as the technical changes for 2.x.x there will also be administrative changes and ZM2 will be moving to GPL3. For those of you frustrated by the difficulties in getting patches into the current version, the opportunities for collaborative development will also be increased with a more open ticketing and source code control system etc. This will hopefully allow a better way of tracking issues and also allow the project to keep moving even when I personally am short of time. Ideally this site and forum will be updated also but that is very much time dependent. Regrettably one of the casualties of this major release is that I do not plan to spend time creating upgrade scripts from 1.x.x releases. Initially ZM2 will be very much an alpha or beta quality anyway so it may be that this will be created by an interested third party but the initial aim of ZM2 will be to simplify, streamline and look forward.

There is a lot of work to do in the weeks and months ahead and whilst I cannot guarantee my availability for a lot of it I am hoping that the New Year brings me more time to work on what hopefully is an exciting period of development.

Phil