SOLVED: grayscale working - color not working

[erpo41]

Hi,

I'm setting up a zoneminder box based on a PC with a Hauppauge ImpactVCB capture board. It's the model with a bt878 chip and 4 bnc connectors.

When I run xawtv, it shows the input from the first and only surveillance camera flawlessly (and in color). xawtv can capture stills (again in color).

When I set up a monitor in zoneminder and set the capture palette to "Grey" in v4l2 or "GREY" in v4l, I get a beautiful, clear grayscale image and everything works perfectly. Motion is detected and events are recorded.

However, when I switch to any other capture palette (and I have tried them all including RGB32, BGR32, and YUV422P), the "/dev/video0 (0)" text in the source column of the main zoneminder page turns red. If I click on the monitor link, I get a monitor page with the image missing. It almost looks like someone left the <img> tag out of the HTML since there isn't even a placeholder. Motion is not detected and events are not recorded.

Other potentially relevant data:
OS: Ubuntu 10.10 (i386)
Zoneminder: 1.24.2 (the version in Ubuntu's repos for 10.10)
Permissions on /dev/video0: 777
Camera video system: NTSC (U.S.)
Capture card video system: NTSC (U.S.)
Zoneminder video system: NTSC (U.S.)

Thanks,
Eric

[Flash_]

Have you amended the shared memory as per the faq?

Colour images use a lot more space than B&W and this may need doing.

If not, check the logs and try and get more info,

[wkulecz]

I'm seeing this too, in fact on my BT848 based four port card initially three of the four were in color, but then they started not working. I set them are to grey and things seem to be working fairly well. Although I seemed to get a lot of lockups while playing with the configuration. After a final reboot with a config that is a good starting point its been up since Monday morning (about 56 hours as I type this).


I using the Ubuntu 10.04 as installed following these instructions:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1535947


And I did the increase shared memory step:
Shared memory settings need to be chnaged for ZoneMinder

$ sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

add this at bottom (128 MB)

kernel.shmall = 134217728 kernel.shmmax = 134217728


Its also not just BT8x8 cards as the saa7130 based card I have would only work in grey mode, although its fine in color with tvtime.

[kingofkya]

I had this issues too i seam to recall switching monitor source to v4l rather than v4l2 or vise versa.

[wkulecz]

As a new zoneminder user, this "don't know what I did but now it works" stuff is not encouraging.

But so far after some initial lockups and bad experience while configuring and testing to figure out what settings give the behavior I want, its been running 24/7 for almost four days now, so I'm basically in the same boat.

Decent start, but I'd hope to do much better than the ~45 days I could go with the Windows based GeoVision system it is trying to replace. The underlying Ubuntu system it runs on is way more reliable than the power company.

All things considered, even if the color stuff worked fine I'd probably put it all in gray scale anyways as these images are much better in low light and in the dark with IR LED lighting.

[erpo41]

Hi,

The problem was indeed the shared memory limit. Adding the line

kernel.shmmax = 1000000000

to the file /etc/sysctl.conf and rebooting fixed the problem. Changing shmall was unnecessary in my configuration as it was already set to its maximum value. I think this has been the default in Linux for a while.

Thanks,
Eric