ZoneMinder Forums

Thanks for the reply. It seems that being patient helps a bit. I currently have 4 cameras recording (2048x1536) @ 4 fps with a load of roughly 1.7 (edit: it dropped to 1.14 now that I've been more patient). I've tried reading about load, but it still doesn't make much sense to me, because htop appears to show my CPU about 55% total utilized? Also my htop looks slightly different than all the screenshots I've seen on the web; it doesn't show me a percentage for each CPU core and only shows 2 numbers in Load Average. Any ideas why I don't see percentages or what these 2 load average numbers mean? Regardless, it sounds like our processors are comparable in performance, but since you have 4 cores and hyper-threading, but I don't, you have much more 'load' to spare...if that makes any sense.

Would you mind passing some of your camera settings to me? I've read that using MJPEG can help rather than using H.264? One of my camerars gives the option of H.264 and H.264H; what's the difference? What about CBR vs VBR? What bitrate or video quality should I set? I-Frame interval?

In zoneminder should I set the max fps? Or leave it blank?
24 bit color?
What about the buffers tab? Anything to change here?
Any other worthwhile tweaks?

Sorry, Hopefully someone else will reply. I have no choices on format, only H.264. I did set mine to highest quality (that is an option, i.e. in words). Mine is set to VBR, though I did not experiment. I set my iframe to 25, it defaulted to 50, and again I did not experiment and do not know what is right (I just thought at 4fps 50 was too long, for no good reason).

I can tell you absolutely in zoneminder for IP cameras you need to leave max FPS blank, it is only for local analog cameras where you would be digitizing. I did not change anything else other than the frame skip which I set to 1, so I could see a bit less jerky image than I saved.

What I have been doing is experimenting with the image settings on my cameras, wide dynamic range, backlight, etc. I find those can help a lot but vary completely by circumstance, and have been working on a program which resets them on a schedule based on time (and sunrise/set). For example, I reset the shutter speed down to 1/12th at night -- a blurry slow speed but gives much less noisy images, then set to 1/120th in the daytime, which has plenty of light and reduces blur if someone is moving fast. But it's all trial and error, I have no general advice really to offer. This is very new to me, hopefully others will chime in.