OPT_FRAME_SERVER Problems

[dvarapala]

I've been using ZM 1.24.2 for a few weeks now and up until yesterday it's been working great. Yesterday was when I went into the options page and enabled OPT_FRAME_SERVER, just to experiment. A short time later, I noticed that some of my events were not playing back properly; the video would stream fine for a while and then freeze, typically around the time the alarm frames were being played back. When the freeze occurs none of the controls work; the only option is to close the event window.

I noticed when looking at the "stills" from these events that there are occasional missing frames (i.e. a grey box appears in the list where one of the frames should be). Presumably the daemon that writes the captured frames to disk is dropping one every now and then, and when the streamer daemon attempts to play the event back it chokes when it can't find the missing frame(s). Naturally I have turned OPT_FRAME_SERVER back off pending further study.

I did searches for OPT_FRAME_SERVER and "dropped frames" but turned up nothing that seemed relevant, hence this post. My system is a Core2 Quad with 2GB of RAM running Fedora 14; the load number is ~2.1, with all 4 cores at ~50% utilization.

My questions:
Am I doing anything obviously wrong?
Why would the capture performance get worse when off-loading the writing of frames to a separate process?
Assuming my assessment of the problem is correct, is there a patch/update to make the streamer daemon more robust in handling missing frames?
Any other thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks!

[jbmia]

I'm curious to know the answer to this as well... Was looking at the OPT_FRAME_SERVER option and came across this post.. it's been a while and there's been no answer.. hopefully at some point, someone will come across this post again and fill in details.