Zoneminder setup finally done but usb web cam not recognized

[valentt]

Hi, I finally managed to install Zoneminder on both Fedora 14 and 17, and I'll post a detailed howto very soon because all tutorials I have seen so far are lacking, and are outdated.

I have used one IP webcam and got it to work without problems with zoneminder, but I'm having problems with locally connected USB webcam.

USB webcam works when I start cheese, it records images and video in 640x480 without any issues.

lsusb shows this info:
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0ac8:3450 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp.

and 'dmesg | grep uvcvideo' show this:
[ 22.112558] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Vimicro USB Camera (Altair) (0ac8:3450)
[ 22.114530] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo

I added new monitor to zoneminder but webcam is red and no matter what I tried it doesn't work

this is my zoneminder source setup:
Device Path: /dev/video0
Capture Method: Video For Linux version 2
Device Channel: 0
Device Format: PAL
Capture Palette: RGB24
Capture Width (pixels): 320
Capture Height (pixels): 240

Any ideas why this usb web camera is not working?

[valentt]

Are there some command line tools that I could use to find out which options I should use with this usb webcam?

[valentt]

I thought about converting camera to mjpeg stream but Fedora doesn't have mjpg-stream tool packages and I'm not sure how to setup vlc to stream video that is compatible with zoneminder.

Has anybody used vlc as streamer that sends video to zoneminder ?

[bb99]

See if this helps: http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... vlc#p75962

[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 still isn't seeing video stream from vlc?

[JayZone]

Hi valentt, did you solve this issue? I have something which looks exactly the same.

I too got vlc to stream my usb webcam, I can verify that it works by running

mplayer "h-t-t-p://127.0.0.1:8080"

but in my zoneminder "monitor view" I only get an empty frame. (Empty in Firefox, solid black in Chrome.)

[valentt]

Nope
And in my home I had two cameras working, not they too are just black frames.

Is there a way to troubleshoot Zoneminder and see what errors are causing this?

[bb99]

Up your debug level in options to 5 to start with and check the logs.