Monitor webcams on Windows PCs on my LAN

[dannyboy]

I'm stumped ... this must be easy but I can't figure out how to do it.

I have a number of laptops on my home LAN, all of which have webcams built in.

What I want to do is stream all of them to Zoneminder which I have up and running on an Ubuntu machine on the LAN.
What I can't do is find a Windows webcam streamer which seems to integrate with Zoneminder.

Does anyone have a setup like this up and running? What software/settings do you recommend?

Thanks in advance
dannyboy

[bb99]

Give VLC a try. As for setting it up I can't help.

[dannyboy]

Yes vlc certainly looks like the right tool for the job but I'm struggling with setting it up to provide a stream that ZoneMinder can recognise.

[bb99]

VideoLan.org is your best bet now. I believe I setup VLC on ZM box and got the VLC to VLC working first using jpeg as the output, then plugged the settings into ZM.

[dannyboy]

Sorted.

On the Windows PCs:
vlc dshow:// --sout "#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=800,width=640,height=480,fps=10}:standard{access=http,mux=asf,dst=:8080}" --no-sout-audio -I dummy

On the Linux PCs:
cvlc v4l2:// --sout "#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=800,width=640,height=480,fps=10}:standard{access=http,mux=asf,dst=:8080}" --no-sout-audio

Within Zoneminder, set the monitor source type to "Ffmpeg" and the source path to h-t-t-p://[ip address of PC running vlc]:8080
(without the dashes - this forum won't let me post what it thinks is a URL)

Hooray!

Now for a bit of optimisation of frame rates/quality etc.

[valentt]

Thanks, it looks like VLC is working perfectly because I can view stream with other video player like mplayer, but Zoneminder still doesn't see any video coming in

I edited shmmax and shmall and it should accept video images bigger than 320x200 because that is usuall issue with Zoneminder and cameras with 640x480 and higher resolutions.

I set these:
echo 536870912 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmall
echo 536870912 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

Any other ideas why Zoneminder isn't seeing cameras?