New camera addition isn't triggering very well.

[pyrodex]

Hello!

Few things first about my setup.

Ubuntu 15.04 x86-64 on a ESX 6 VM
Zoneminder PPA from iconnor and running 1.28.109-vivid-2015122301 as of this post
DS-2CD2232-I5 x 2
DS-2CD2032-I x 1

I got a new DS-2CD2042WD-I for the holidays attempted to set it up similar to the others as mentioned above and I was able to get a picture in ZM and then setup the zone excluding the roof line since it is a top-down view of the front walkway. The problem I am running into is that ZM isn't really doing a good job of triggering events on this new camera as it is with my existing ones. The only thing different I've noticed in this newer HIKVISION when recording STREAM 2 is that it is now 15FPS vs 25/30FPS but I've tried to change my buffers accordingly for that factor. I've done some tweaking and lowered the alarm frames to 3 but still no luck on events I actually want to see. Below is a list of events and the experience I've noticed:

Night/Day IR cut - ZM event triggered
Front Porch Lights cut off/on due to ZWave Triggers from SmartThings - ZM event triggered
Dog Sitter coming/leaving while we were gone during the holidays - NO ZM event triggers
People walking in/out front door for testing - NO ZM event triggers

Below are my settings in hopes I could tweak something to get it working as expected and looking for some help here... thanks!

General - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/207349/general.PNG
Buffers - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/207349/buffers.PNG
Zone Settings - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/207349/zones.PNG

[knight-of-ni]

Thank you for the screenshots. That tells us everything we need.

Your motion threshold is currently set to 20 percent of the zone, which in your case the zone is the entire field of view.
Looking at the screenshot, can you image how big an object must be to account for 20% of the field of view?
It's pretty big, and I'm not surprised one person was not enough. Two people might be enough.

Because ZoneMinder only displays statistics when motion is triggered, you need to set your motion settings to be ultra sensitive and then gradually reduce the sensitivity as you observe how the system performs. That way you can observe the motion statistics as you tune the system.

For starters, leave blob detection on, set your motion threshold to 1 percent, and observe what happens. You will certainly pick up people now, but it might pick up false triggers as well. You need to open up both desired and undesired events and look at the statistics that show the red outline where the motion occurred and what percent of motion was recorded.

For example, let's say a person causes 6% motion, and the neighbor's cat causes 2% but you don't want to record the cat.... that means you need to bump the threshold to something higher than 2, but less than 6. Continue to monitor and adjust the system over different times of the day and different weather conditions.

You will find that most settings are a trade off. A setting that works well during the day might very well trigger false alarms all night long. You can either seek a compromise setting that works well enough most of the time, or use different run states during different times of the day.

Oh, and uh, you need to clean out your gutters.

[pyrodex]

Thank you for the screenshots. That tells us everything we need.

Your motion threshold is currently set to 20 percent of the zone, which in your case the zone is the entire field of view.
Looking at the screenshot, can you image how big an object must be to account for 20% of the field of view?

Oh, and uh, you need to clean out your gutters.

Thanks for the input!

In the zone settings is the 20% you speak of the "MIN/MAX PIXEL THRESHOLD (0-255)" setting? That is the only one I can see set to a value near 20 anywhere but I am thrown off by the 0-255 when we are talking percentages. However I guess the 0-255 doesn't hold water when the unit is set to percentages above... Maybe some coding logic could re-word the phrase to the proper unit in the future ?

Also my gutters are due to be cleaned on the 4th... had to wait for the damn leaves to stop falling with all the cold/warm/cold/warm weather we've been having here in the southeast.

[knight-of-ni]

Ah, dang it. I was on a roll last night with forum replies, and it looks like I misread your screenshot.
The values I stated don't make sense for the view in your screenshot.
The general idea still applies though, but you should change your units from percent to pixels.
Set the values in all your Min/Max Area fields to something low like 500 pixels.
You want to make your system very sensitive... pick up everything... and then bump the Min Area threshold up gradually to filter out known unwanted events.