ZM gives up after any error on IP cam

Forum for questions and support relating to the 1.24.x releases only.
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peely
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Dec 05, 2009 4:01 pm

ZM gives up after any error on IP cam

Post by peely »

Hi,

I have a frustrating issue with ZM and my Y-Cam Knight SD. It seems that the slightest issue with the stream causes ZM to give up and render a black screen on the monitor. Opening the camera settings in ZM and clicking OK gets the image back, but only for 5 minutes or so.

Whilst I realise that the camera should pro producing perfect MJPEG image streams every time, I do feel like ZM should be a little more tolerant of glitches in the image stream.

Does anyone have a patch for this? I'm running the standard Zoneminder install from the Ubuntu repos on Karmic.



Thanks,



Neil.
cybergamer
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2009 3:54 am

Post by cybergamer »

This is a constant frustration for me too. I run cameras on an 802.11n/airmax network around a neighborhood and the slightest bump in the connection quality means zoneminder gives up on cameras. This creates outages that last hours until I can reset zoneminder. We've missed thieves this way before.

Insight, anyone?!
Flash_
Posts: 441
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:19 pm

Post by Flash_ »

Use jpg feeds instead of mjpeg. (Certainly doable on the ycam) Jpgs are requested every time. They're slower but far more reliable.

Also - zoneminder wouldn't be out for hours if recording; events are reset every ten minutes by default and you can change that period in config. If you're seeing hours of dropouts I would suggest the network has been out for hours and unavailable each time zm tries to initiate it.

In both cases here, I don't think it's fair to blame zm for what is clearly a problem with the network. CCTV cameras, wired or wireless, should not disappear off the network, ever. Spend your time fixing that, imo.
cybergamer
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2009 3:54 am

Post by cybergamer »

What you say makes sense...however

- All my cameras only support jpeg. I don't use MJPEG anywhere in my system.
- The network is not out. Zoneminder seems not to re-establish connection to cameras that have given it a blip or two in some situations.

I have two ZM boxes, one running 1.23 and the other 1.24. Both exhibit this issue. I know the network is not down for hours because one or two out of TWENTY cameras will go out. The others will continue humming along quite happily.

Despite the fact that we use pretty low end cameras we use high end, fantastically reliable wireless equipment. (All Ubiquiti 2M series AirMax equipment) We're not talking about a crappy network here..we're talking about maybe once per 24 hours there is a hesitation of a second or two getting one camera to respond and this seems to just slaughter ZM.

I've spent the past several years getting to know ZM really well so this puzzles me. It's just frustrating so I'm sorry if I come off as ticked off. I'm open to a calm discussion of how to address the issue. I believe it is something that can be fixed in software since I can simply restart zoneminder and suddenly the blacked out cameras hop back to life and stay that way for hours or days more.
henke
Posts: 60
Joined: Thu Nov 10, 2005 8:16 am

Post by henke »

Hi,

Did you find any solution for this other than restarting ZM regularly?


I am seeing this myself on 1.24.2.
Didnt see it on 1.22.x versions.

Thought this http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14008 patch would fix it but it fixes more things on the streaming side. Not so much on the capturing.
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