video sync problem

[duffrecords]

I've been using Motion for a couple of years to monitor my two security cameras. It works, but since it lacks the ability to focus on zones it ends up generating thousands of files, which require cleanup scripts and is incredibly tedious if I want to locate an event. So I decided to try ZoneMinder.

I've got the console up and running and I can see both monitors. However, the vertical sync on one or the other is off. Sometimes it's one monitor, sometimes the other--it's random. If I stop ZoneMinder and start up Motion, both cameras display correctly:

Motion: two browser windows, both cameras are streaming with no sync problems

motion.png (250.24 KiB) Viewed 2058 times

ZoneMinder: console, one monitor is vertically out of sync

zoneminder.png (200.81 KiB) Viewed 2058 times

I should point out these are being captured by the same device. I have a Hauppauge ImpactVCB with 4 inputs and I'm using the first two composite inputs. I understand the more inputs this card uses the lower the framerate of each stream but why does it work correctly in Motion but not in ZoneMinder? These are my settings for the cameras:

Device Path - /dev/impactvcb
Capture Method - Video for Linux version 2
Device Channel - 0
Device Format - NTSC
Capture Palette - YUYV
Capture Width (pixels) - 320
Capture Height (pixels) - 240
Preserve Aspect Ratio - unchecked
Orientation - Normal

/dev/impactvcb is a symbolic link I created with a udev rule because the device numbers change sometimes when I reboot. Perhaps the capture palette is wrong. I tried all the others and only a few of them displayed anything.

[bb99]

Try setting options::config::CAPTURES_PER_FRAME to a value of 2; also disable V4L_MULTI_BUFFER on same tab.

[duffrecords]

Thanks! That looks MUCH better. Setting CAPTURES_PER_FRAME to 2 stabilized the images but dropped the fps to 6.15 at a max resolution of 320x240. Disabling V4L_MULTI_BUFFER also stabilized it and lowered the fps to 5.12 but it allowed the resolution to be 640x480 (the cameras' native resolution). I can't wait to get ZoneMinder fully set up; it looks way more sophisticated than Motion. Now I don't have to write custom shell scripts to handle program execution.