How does ZoneMinder display MPEG streams in a browser?

lister · Post by **lister** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 9:30 pm

I am looking at using Zone Minder to let me access my CCTV cameras from work, but just wondered how MPEG streams are displayed in the browser?

I see that MJPEG is natively supported, or supported via Java appletts such as Cambozola, but how is MPEG supported?

Is it another Java applett? An Active-X plugin? Quicktime?
Also how is it streamed? Simply over HTTP, or something like RTSP?

Oh! And what format of MPEG is it? MPEG4? ASP or H.264?

Soz for all the questions

Lister

lister · Post by **lister** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 10:02 pm

Ah! No matter. I've just found this in the docs which answers a lot of my questions.

MPEG video streaming. ZoneMinder now supports true video streaming if configured with the –with-ffmpeg option. This allows one or both of live or event streaming to be in this format rather than motion JPEG style as before. Note however that is still somewhat experimental and may not work on your system. The reason for this is due to the variation in plugins and video movie formats. Currently I have got it working well with browsers on Windows platforms using the Windows Media Player plugin and the 'asf' video format. I have also managed to get event streaming working on Mozilla using mplayer (I think) though it jumps in and out of it's place in the window a bit. I would appreciate any feedback or advice on formats and plugins that work on your system. Also note that video streaming tends to get buffered before being displayed. This can result in the 'live' view being several seconds delayed.

That was release 1.19.0 though. Has anything changed / improved since then?

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:26 am

streaming is either by jpeg or ffmpeg supported codec, be that mpeg, asf flash etc.
The plug in required is usually windows media player

lister · Post by **lister** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 9:34 am

You mention Flash there. Are you seriously able to stream live video to a Flash player?!?!?

That would be fantastic as not all my boxes are Windows.

Post by **cordel** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 9:36 am

Just set swf

lister · Post by **lister** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 11:14 am

cordel wrote:Just set swf

That's blimmin fantastic if it works!
But can you tell me more about how it works?
I presume the SWF is just a small Flash app that then streams a live FLV?I thought Flash video had to be streamed via RTMP though?

Post by **cordel** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 6:46 pm

lister wrote:That's blimmin fantastic if it works!
But can you tell me more about how it works?

It does work but it seems only certain diminsions. I haven't had a chance to figure out why yet.
ZM it self does not produce mpg, asf or swf but uses ffmpeg to produce these streams and embed them in it's web pages. To be honest I don't know if it's send via RPC or RTMP as I only know enough of ffmpeg to just get it to work

but it's embeded like most other videos with http. Guess I should go to their site and readup

sergiut2002 · Post by **sergiut2002** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 9:29 am

do you know how can i reduce the buffer so the camera is displayed faster?

i used mplayer on localhost where zm is installed and mplayer was buffering too much.. somethimes was only buffering no image displayed at all
________
FORD FREESTAR

Post by **cordel** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 10:41 am

You might check the players settings and see if you can reduce or stop it from buffering. I usualy use the flash format and player as that does not buffer, but all formats suffer from delayed video that increases the longer you have the stream going.