Foscam FI9900P

[amckay]

Well I should have done more research before buying these gawd-forsaken cameras, but now I may be stuck with them. I cannot even log into the GUI on them with Linux because of some stupid WIndows-only plugin that is required. What an nightmare!

All that said, does anyone have this camera working in Zoneminder? I found one reference on "Marc's Public Blog" but he does not give any details on how he got it working, and he does not have any way to contact him to ask.

Using the CGI tools on the cam I am able to get a snapshot picture, but not a video stream. I've tried every other imaginable option and nothing.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, your'e my only hope!

[bbunge]

I have to chuckle... I'm not Ben Kenobi (just finished re-watching the first three Star Wars before the new release) but I will take some time today to do some research to help you..

bb

[bbunge]

After a review of the Foscam manual for this camera it looks like the "usual" settings for a Foscam HD camera will work

Use ffmpeg
Source: rtsp://admin:password@IP-Address:88/videoMain
Resolution I use is 640x320 but other multiples should work.

Once you get into your cameras you may want to set the key frame interval and frame rate lower. You may want to set the user back to admin as this seems to work best for me.

[amckay]

Thanks I will look at this later ... probably will not have time til tomorrow but I will report back.

I did try what you said in ZM but it sounds like I need to tweak camera settings on the cam side so I will play with that.

[amckay]

Oh dang I am sorry for this but I just realized this should be in the 1.26 forum not 1.28. I could have sworn I had that right.

Just found some time to play around with it and checked that first. Dunno if Mr Admin can move that or not - if not, my apologies.

[amckay]

OK so I have it partially working - and my first mistake was bad enough that I already feel compelled to make a donation to the project for wasting your time - but I am still having another problem. We shall see whether or not it will require me to up the sum I will donate. Sigh.

So my first problem was that I am running ZM on my firewall and the camera is on the inside network, and I have fairly restrictive rules allowing traffic from the FW to the inside. Dumb, dumb, dumb. So I allow all from the FW to my Foscam and now I get something.

The problem is now that within my ZM view pane (monitor) the lower half of the video gets washed out. It is not like that on the original source when viewing it on a windows machine with IE. Right now the lower half is all pixelated yellow - it was purple a moment ago. Sometimes a ghost image of what I am supposed to see shows up. The top half of the video stream is perfect.

I play around with all sorts of settings on the camera and it does not seem to change this. Resolution. Frame Rate. Rate control mode (whatever that is).

So .. any ideas at this point?

[amckay]

OK I just found your ZM Repo for CentOS 7 and am going to install that on my Desktop just for debugging ... and it is 1.28 by the looks of it so we can keep this thread real

[amckay]

OK hit a roadblock on ZMrepo because Zoneminder conflicts with something I have install from the nuxdesktop repo.

However, I thought to try Firefox instead of Chrome and it seems to work better - only the bottom 1/4 of the stream is all botched up, not the bottom 1/2

Then I also thought to switch from wired to wifi and BAM the problem is fixed! I switched the Foscam over to Wifi and that did the trick. Even for Chrome.

I wonder what the deal is there? The cam had been plugged into a crappy little switch that my PS3 and kids' gaming PC are both plugged into, and they are going nuts on those. I wonder if that is it.

[amckay]

OK now off to figure out how to make a donation to the project ... sorry for my stupid mistake above.

[amckay]

Oh dang, is it possible to donate without signing up to Bounty Source? That looks like a neat way of doing donations but I don't need another account. I selected Paypal but when I clicked through it wanted me to set up a Bounty Source account.

And if I did sign up my bounty would be "Buy the Zoneminder dude a beer"

[amckay]

Well bad news - the blurred bottom is back. I am still on wifi.

Any ideas?

[knight-of-ni]

Blurring and tearing is a common issue with ffmpeg. It has been discussed in many forum threads.
Use the search button to find those threads and learn of the workarounds.

[amckay]

Thanks. Unfortunately there are 353 pages of hits on "FFMpeg" with 15 threads per page. And nothing in the FAQ on this.

If someone can point me to some better detail on things to try I will put together something for the FAQ.

I found a few things so far but nothing definitive.