RTSP/ffmpeg producing grey images or smears?

[m00dawg]

I suspect this might be more related to the camera, though I haven't been able to reproduce it when looking at the stream directly. If I try to use Remote/RTSP or FFMPEG/RTSP with my Foscam FI9821P, it works but I get lots of "alarms" due to the stream turning all grey and/or smearing. I can see this when I'm live viewing as well.

Since viewing the same stream in VLC doesn't cause this, it made me think something was up with perhaps the libraries being used with Zoneminder. There's a chance that I got lucky when was viewing in VLC as well.

I wanted to try this out because using the photo-capture method, while it works decently, also sometimes drops out and I can't get a high framerate using that method. I also wasn't able to figure out how to request a smaller image (I was planning on using a tiny image for motion detection while recording a larger one).

Anyone have any thoughts? Since I get issues with both methods (just a lot fewer issues with the photo-capture), it does make me wonder if it's the camera. But as mentioned, I haven't been able to reproduce the issues outside of ZoneMinder.

[knight-of-ni]

That's exactly why libvlc support was added to ZoneMinder, to give users a way around the smear/tearing/corrupted images that can happen when using ffmpeg. Not everyone experiences this. There are quite a few discussions in this forum about this common issue and the available workarounds.

[GaryB]

I have 12 FosCam FI9853EPs and one very similar outdoor camera and am seeing the same thing, they are on a Gigabit network with PoE and when I put them into record on motion detect they go all grey and what I call 'glitchy' and fill up a 2Terabyte disk in three or four days with junk. The server is brand new, bought just fior this, dual core AMD with 8 Gig of memory, CentOS 6.4.

I changed all the cameras to monitor this morning and CPU Utilization went from 80% to 65%.

My partner has a IPad and he can monitor all 13 cameras simultaneously with an Apple App and has no glitching at all so the cameras are perfect.

How do I use the VLC libraries instead of FFMpeg?

Gary B

[bbunge]

I have better luck with ffmpeg than libvlc. Running a Foscam FI9821W V2 with the following videoMain settings:
Stream Type HD Mode
Resolution 720P
Bit Rate 128K
Frame Rate 10
Key Frame Interval 50
Variable bitrate Yes

You can also append ?tcp to your source path to force TCP. Lowering your key frame interval may help but will increase network usage a bit.
I also feel that changing PATH_SWAP to use RAM Disk (for Ubuntu 14.04 it is /run/shm) may help. RAM is a lot faster than any hard drive.
bb

[m00dawg]

Interesting. I'll have to try ffmpeg with your settings and see how it goes then. libvlc is actually working reliably now, but it does use noticeably more CPU. Nothing my system can't keep up with for just my test camera, but that could be significant once I start adding more cameras.

With libvlc stable, I was able to use a big/small sort of setup. I use /videoMain on Nodetect at 720p but then setup /videoSub for 320x180 which I use in mocord. So 720p only kicks in for motion, and that seems to work rather well. It does make skimming video for the 720p stream a bit more difficult but otherwise it seems good.