ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I've been running Zoneminder very successfully for about 18 months now using only 1 IP Camera (Axis). Zoneminder has been almost scarily stable and I've forgotten most of the installation issues I went through. It integrates nicely with MythTV as well.

Zoneminder is running on my server (Fedora 8 ) and there is another machine on my network that is running *most* (99%) of the time (a MythTV frontend running Ubuntu 8.04 on a Mac Mini). I've just bought a Philips SPC900NC to use as a camera for Skype 2.0 for Linux on that machine.

So - I have two questions:

1. Can I have my server access the USB cam on a different computer on the network? Is there something additional I have to run on the Ubuntu machine to have it stream the image that the server with zoneminder can read?

2. Can I share this USB cam with Skype (running on the Ubuntu machine). I don't mind the camera being unavailable to Zoneminder when Skype is actually on a call - but how would ZM handle the on/off nature of the camera?

Many thanks,
Nick

OK - to answer my own question.

It seems I need to run vlc on my 'slave' (the ubuntu machine) to stream the webcam output via http. Then add that stream to my zoneminder setup. Running it as a daemon.

When I need to use Skype - I manually kill the vlc process, use Skype, then restart the vlc streaming daemon. Klunky solution unfortunately. Network cameras clearly work much better with ZM.