Interesting bug: zoneminder camera stream lags

[McFuzz]

Hello!

I am running ZoneMinder v1.26.4 on Debian and I noticed a very interesting bug with one of my Foscam FI8910w. Basically - the stream from the camera when viewed via ZM lags by 15-20 seconds versus what Foscam's UI shows. However, if I leave the Foscam UI on one browser tab and then the ZM stream on another tab - the streams will eventually sync and remain synced UNTIL I close the Foscam UI.

The interesting thing that only ONE camera behaves like that; it is also the one camera that is simply a monitor. I compared the settings with an identical FI8910w and these are my discoveries: The other FI8910W which is triggered by yet a third camera (FI8904W), has an image buffer of 600 frames, with 150 frames for post and pre alarm frames; the misbehaving Foscam has all default numbers. I decided to swap the values around - give the misbehaving Foscam 600 frame image buffer, etc... but that did not resolve the problem.

Next, I noticed that the misbehaving Foscam had a max of 10 FPS with also 10 FPS for alarm max FPS; the non-misbehaving Foscam has 20 max FPS and 15 max FPS for alarm. I decided to set these same values for the misbehaving Foscam - meaning change it from 10 and 10 to 20 and 15 respectively... lo' and behold, the problem seems to have been resolved!



Except until I've restarted ZM, the log exploded with "Attempt to directly assign buffer from an undersized buffer of size: 400056" error messages.






So - does anyone know why dropping maximum FPS causes such lag? Between it being at 10 FPS max and 20 FPS max, the camera's actual FPS changed from 10.4ish to 13.00ish...

[linuxsense]

I cant provide much help but I have seen it mentioned in the ZM wiki that these cams can lag if a min or max FPS is defined in ZM. I have a FI8918W and it runs about 10.5 FPS in the zoneminder feed, not sure what its actually capable of, but I have always been under the impression that the device just maxed out at 10. Are your Foscams using wifi or ethernet? I have never had particularly reliable performance with mine on wifi but its been solid when wired. Did you poke around here? http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Foscam

[McFuzz]

I cant provide much help but I have seen it mentioned in the ZM wiki that these cams can lag if a min or max FPS is defined in ZM. I have a FI8918W and it runs about 10.5 FPS in the zoneminder feed, not sure what its actually capable of, but I have always been under the impression that the device just maxed out at 10. Are your Foscams using wifi or ethernet? I have never had particularly reliable performance with mine on wifi but its been solid when wired. Did you poke around here? http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Foscam

Thanks for the response. I have two WiFi cameras one one wired; the wired one maxes out at 15 FPS but sometimes goes down to 10... but never below 10. It seems to preform better at night... go figure.

The camera that was misbehaving was one of the WiFi's ones - it's odd that in the ZoneMinder UI it lagged but not in the actual Foscam UI!