Many short events in modect - normal behavior?

[mintypenguin]

Hi,

I just started using zoneminder. Currently I'm trying it out with one Foscam 8910W, wired into my LAN. The camera is situated so that it can look down the length of my (long, narrow) house, with one zone that will detect if anyone enters comes into the interior of the house from my exterior doors, like looking down a hallway. I'm running it for now on a Intel core i3 with 4 GB RAM, writing events to a local 2 TB disk. I'm running version 1.25 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit. Both the camera and the computer are connected to
the network via ethernet.

After a couple of nights of tinkering with it, the system is running stable and not throwing errors, except for occasional socket sendto error which doesn't seem to affect system behavior. I can view a live feed at 10-15 fps and it reliably picks up motion without throwing false alarms.

On to my question. The system reliably picks up motion, saves it to events and will email me with snapshots and mpeg files based on an alarm score filter. But the events are relatively short and it seems to me like in many case several of my events could be one single longer event.

For example, I come in my house at the far end of the camera range, and start walking toward the camera at a steady walking pace, never leaving the detection zone. The sytem will often treat the single stroll toward the camera as two or possibly three events of a few seconds each, and will end up sending me multiple alerts. The images, movies, etc. all look fine, and when I run the playback in gapless mode you can't tell there are discrete events. They just show up as multiple entries in the events log.

So, my question is: is this normal behavior? Several relatively short events that you would normally think would be one? I just want to know if this is expected behavior or if there is something I should be tweaking. I like this software a lot, particularly the granularity in the event logging, and it runs very stable for me.

Thanks,

Brian

[bb99]

Change the monitor's Post Event Image Count to a value equal to 10-15 seconds (10 sec. * X fps = setting value)

[mintypenguin]

That did the trick. Many thanks!

[ris2t]

Thanks, exactly the situation I have and the answer I was hoping for.

[jeremyenos]

Having this issue ever since I upgraded to latest. I'll give this a shot.

I'm a little confused though- I thought "section length" determined the lengths of recordings in record or mocord modes, which I'm using. e.g.

Code: Select all

Section Length This specifies the length (in seconds) of any fixed length events produced when the monitor function
is ‘Record’ or ‘Mocord’. Otherwise it is ignored. This should not be so long that events are difficult to navigate
nor so short that too many events are generated. A length of between 300 and 900 seconds I recommended.

[dougmccrary]

Tons of stuff is different between 1.25 and 1.36. Most of the documentation in the ZM web page is correct, like what you quoted.

[jeremyenos]

Meaning that this behavior w/ 1.36 is a bug then? It's particularly bad with my higher resolution camera for some reason.

[dougmccrary]

There are always bugs, but this is just different settings required.