[solved]analog cams=horrible image & crazy frames

[axelm]

Hi guys,

I have been using zm at home for about three weeks now. Bought a couple of low end cameras, some siamese coax cable and two used Kodicom 4400R cards to play with.

PC Hardware:
- AMD Athlon X2 4000 with 3 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive
- Asrock AliveNF6G-VSTA motherboard
- Fedora 18 i686
- zm 1.25 using shared memory instead of mmap
- dual Kodicom 4400R PCI, so that would be 8 x BT878a chips

Front porch (Modetect 1) /dev/video0: 600TVL minidome with 1/3" Sony Super HAD CCD II sensor, 30 x 5mm IR LEDs, waterproof, fixed 3.6mm lens
Modetect @ 12 FPS, PAL BGR24 720x576

Corridor - (Modetect 2) /dev/video1: 420TVL minidome with 1/4" Sony CCD sensor, 24 x 5mm IR LEDs, waterproof, fixed 3.6mm lens
Modetect @ 15 FPS, PAL BGR24 640x480

Both are generic Chinese cameras sold in my country using the Nixzen brand.

I know that the cameras are pretty lousy, but I am also struggling with the capture itself. None of these problems appear in the images if I use xawtv or tvtime.

Problem 1: horizontal lines in frames with movement. See image1.jpg. Do I need to activate some kind of comb filter?

Problem 2: frames with ghosts
In the same frame I get two images of a person, the current one and an old one, from 5 or 6 frames ago. See image2.jpg. Sounds like a software bug since I don't think the camera has any frame buffers.

Problem 3: image seems to blend two frames in one. Check out image1 and look at the girl's foot in the bottom right. It's in two places in the same image. Is this done on purpose to make the transition between frames smoother?

Problem 4: frames out of sequence.
Could be related to problem 2. If I am walking from left to right in the image, suddenly for a single frame I appear to the left again and then the next frame continues in the right sequence. You would need to see a whole event, but believe me it happens very frequently and it is easy to reproduce.

I would like to solve these three issues before buying more cameras. Please check out the attached frames. I can upload the whole event to mega.co.nz if you would like to see the whole sequence.

Thanks in advance,
Axel

[axelm]

Now here's an event which shows buggy zm recording frames in the incorrect order.

https://mega.co.nz/#!5o00VCrZ!YxlOn0JQc ... hTfjdR3SA

I have removed the analyse frames to reduce the download size.

It's really really hard to use zoneminder like this.

[axelm]

I was about to give up on zm until I tried this: http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... =9&t=20587

Wow! What a change! Now I get perfect deinterlaced image.

There are still some bugs to be fixed, mainly the fact that the frames are out of order and sometimes duplicated. This happens with stock 1.25.0 too.

[axelm]

I have uploaded a sample event to https://mega.co.nz/#!w5E1lAjR!TJPLqG_ch ... 7U4-LJlvF8

The event starts at 09:02:15 but frames 1 to 6 are really from 09:02:19. This happens in all my events, the first six frames are a copy of frames 51 to 56.

Another question, where are my 50 post-event frames. The recording stops when I close the door.

[axelm]

Sorry to bump this thread but I still have this issue with the first frames. Can someone help?

[axelm]

Crazy first frames sequence solved by increasing Monitor / Buffers / Image Buffer Size (frames).

Now I have another problem. Some stills are missing in the sequence. They are not on the hard drive either.

[axelm]

Disabled OPT_FRAME_SERVER and now everything works