Selectable audio.

Mr.Ed · Post by **Mr.Ed** » Fri May 27, 2005 10:44 am

Hi there,

A few members allready asked for audio support (including myself) in one of the upcoming versions. I would like to add some additional ideas regarding audio. Just some "thinking out loud"?

Some of my camera's are positioned inside the house, looking outside. For those (USB) camera's, which have a built-in microphone, sometimes it would be desirable to be able to switch audio off. Only for that particular camera.

For inside camera's looking at the interiour, it could be desirable to be able to switch audio on, only for that particular camera. It could be desirable to be able to switch audio off for an indoor camera (looking outside), and be able to provide an external audio source, for instance an outside microphone.

And finally, in Montage view, it could be desirable to have all (selectable

) audio channels be mixed into one single audio channel. For instance, when doing serveillance, all is very quiet, yet all camera's need to be monitored for movement AND sounds.

It's not that i need ALL of these items, but i would like to ask the software guru(s) just to think about these possibilities.

My favourite is to be able to switch audio off on a "per-camera" basis.

Keep up the good work with this excellent piece of software!

Best regards,

Ed.

Post by **zoneminder** » Fri May 27, 2005 2:56 pm

Audio is currently implemented as follows. Monitors can be defined as being video, audio or audio/video. Additional options allow you to specify the various triggering limits etc for audio were required. So you can have audio only, video only or whatever you like. The audio source can be either local e.g /dev/audio connected to whatever hardware you like or a remote url as per video streams. Currently I don't really have any audio supporting netcams so I can't be sure exactly how that is going to work at present.

Additionally, probably in the same release, monitors will be able to trigger each other so if you have a master audio monitor by your door and it detects something, all you other cameras (or a subset) can be set to start recording.

I wrestled long and hard about whether to force monitors to be audio or video only but in the end went for allowing a combination even though it is more fiddly as hopefully it will be more flexible.

I like your suggestion about mixing the audio streams in montage mode and will see how easy it is to implement.

Phil

Post by **zoneminder** » Fri May 27, 2005 2:58 pm

I also should add that streaming audio to a browser at all is causing a few problems at present. If anyone knows any elegant methods, preferably that don't involve WMP etc, I'd be most interested to hear about them.

Phil

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 10:32 pm

it appears we need to find a better media player for both audio and video. dont suppose realaudio is anygood as implimented by bbc for radio. what about mp3 streaming?

Post by **zoneminder** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 2:06 pm

I suspect ultimately the native ZM player interface is probably the simplest solution. It wouldn't have to support dozens of odd formats or be skinnable etc so it would probably not be to complicated to implement, certainly for audio.

Phil

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 3:06 pm

oh wow