view/export/create videos and/or events later on

[hesral]

Sorry, my bad. The path is "/var/cache/zoneminder/events/". It is just full of forlders representing the monitor numbers, and symlinks to the folders, named by the monitor name. The path format of the event folders are "monitor_id/year/month/day/hour/minute/second/". The date and time of the start of the event. The video files created for the event should be in the "second/" folder.

To see when the video encoding jobs are done, you can run "top" in a terminal, on your zoneminder server. If the server is running on a headless server, you will have to ssh into the server. You should get a list of running processes, sorted by cpu usage. It updates automatically, and you get out by typing "q". As long as "ffmpeg" is near the top, and it probably will be at the top, the converting job is still running.

Also, on my zoneminder server, all zoneminder web pages stop working. Everything else keeps on ticking, like recording and stuff like that, but the console and live view times out. But when the console window start working again, I know that the converting job is done. Maybe its only my server, but be careful before starting to convert every recorded event in the database. You may not get control back for quite some time.

[rodeored]

-bash: cd: /var/cache/zoneminder/events/: No such file or directory

I'm in Fedora, the events are in /var/www/html/zm/events
It seems like the filter page should provide links to the video, like the event page does when you click on video.
Is there no way to list the videos that were made from the filters page? I have no idea where they are in all that maze of directories in events

[hesral]

what kind of video files are you creating?

Lets say you make .mp4 files.

You can then type:
find /var/www/html/zm/events/ | grep "\.mp4"
it should provide you with the path to each .mp4 file in any subdirectory of /var/www/html/zm/events/
The command may take some time to finish, as it is actually piping a list of every file under that directory, and searching each line for the text ".mp4". And there will be a lot of files under that directory.

[mikb]

what kind of video files are you creating?

Lets say you make .mp4 files.

Or even more efficiently ...

Code: Select all

find /var/www/html/zm/events -type f -iname "*.mp4"

where :-

-type f - files only
-iname - case insensitive filename match

[rodeored]

Thanks for the tips. But this raises another question. How do I tell the execute button in the filter box to make mp4 files? It doesn't ask me what kind of files to make. When I make movies i the export box, it asks me what kind of video to make, but it doesn't have mp4 as a choice.

[hesral]

In the options, you can set the command line for ffmpeg. This is where you may enter codec information, encoding profile and such. There is also a textbox for video format. This is the filetype you want to be available. The first file format with a star beside it, seems to be chosen for file format.

so if you set ffmpeg_output_options, under images, to something like
-vcodec libx264 -profile fast -crf 18
and ffmpeg_formats to
mp4*
then you should get mp4 files with high detail h264 video.
You may tweak this for your purposes.
if you set -crf 22 you may loose some detail, but at the same time probably get smaller files.
if you set -profile slow the encode will take more time, but may produce smaller files
I have not experimented much with these settings, so I don't know much about the rate of gains and losses.

You must have x264 installed. And at least on ubuntu, you need libavcodec-extra-53 for this to work.