ZoneMinder Forums

With 1.24 (preview) released Axis and ACTi cameras are supported for RTSP feeds. You need to adjust a couple things in the control panel of the ACTi web interface:

Video Setting -> Streaming Method (RTP over UDP)
Video Setting -> Encoder Type (MPEG4)

Make sure the default ports are enabled:

RTSP Port: 7070
Video Control Port: 6001

You will be better off at 640x480 @ 30FPS for now. You can test with higher resolutions but I don't believe Phil had access to megapixel cameras and the difference in frame rate may throw off the way Zoneminder is expecting to receive the data.

Note: If anyone is interested in seeing a demo with a remote ACTi camera we have several available that you can connect with from your local ZM box. Contact me to get the links

There are still some quirks with ACTi cameras that I see anyway.

I get Unsupported Transport errors when closing the stream even though the same parameters are used as when opening it. Not a big deal but clutters up the logs. Also I get a more dropouts and general crap images that ffmpeg objects to from ACTi than I do from the Axis cams. I don't know what the cause of this is though.

I was hoping to get some feedback/update on how well ACTi works with Zoneminder. The 5771N camera meets my image and price specifications, but those mean nothing if the camera does not work seamless with Zoneminder.

Is there a lot of monkeying around needed to get it to work? Are there any bugs that I should be aware about? Is it stable? Does RTSP work well? Thank you for your feedback. Curtishall seems to have a lot of experience with these ACTi, but I was hoping to get some more community member opinions. Thanks.

~Grant

I would like to give the ACTI a go again if you don't mind. I want to see how they perform with the latest Zoneminder SVN and mapped memory.

I have ACTi cameras working ok at the moment (though not tried the model you mention).

However there are the following provisos.
1) They require a username and password for streaming so if you want to use RTSP streaming you will need to apply the RTSP authentication patch from the Wiki to your ffmpeg.
2) They only appear to curently support RTP over UDP so you can't tunnel it over RTSP or HTTP as you can with Axis for example. The effect of this is that mpeg streaming really only works on one network and can't effectively be streamed over a router without manually burying it in a VPN for example.

can't effectively be streamed over a router without manually burying it in a VPN for example

Can you go alittle more in detail on that? I can run OpenVPN client or server on the routers I'm testing and have already had the feeds from the actual router connecting and feeding a vpn server with Zoneminder. I've had a IP camera plugged into a modifed router running OpenVPN with Openwrt. All I do is then enter port forward rules to the tun device and then to the local IP that the camera is gettings. This allows me from anywhere in the world no matter the network configuration to get to the router and to the camera feed just as if it was a local machine. I just enter the address in Zoneminder that the router is getting from the VPN server and then the port number the router is port forwarding to the camera.

Hope that makes sense. Would this benefit anyone? Will this be fixed by patching Zoneminder or is it something ACTI needs to do? I haven't applied the patch lately to ffpeg, does it still error out?

Thanks[/quote]

iigruntii wrote:I was hoping to get some feedback/update on how well ACTi works with Zoneminder. The 5771N camera meets my image and price specifications, but those mean nothing if the camera does not work seamless with Zoneminder.

Is there a lot of monkeying around needed to get it to work? Are there any bugs that I should be aware about? Is it stable? Does RTSP work well? Thank you for your feedback. Curtishall seems to have a lot of experience with these ACTi, but I was hoping to get some more community member opinions. Thanks.

~Grant

Can you confirm this model number? ACM-5771 doesn't exist. We have several ACTi cameras here available for a demo if you want to test one out for an hour.

Yeah, sorry, I meant the ACM-5711.

That is interesting that RTSP cameras will not work over HTTP. Is that the case with RTSP in general or just for ACTi cameras? I was hearing alot of positive things about RTSP and how it lowers CPU overhead.

Curtis, if I login to your cameras do they show stills or video? If it is video how did you get that to work?

One last question is how diffcult is it to get the 720x480p video to work? I know that Zoneminder supports 640x480 video natively.

The plan for this camera is to attach it to a bird house. My wife and I (mostly me) are really excited about this project. Thank you everyone for the feedback.

FYI,

We were able to get the ACM4200 to work with 1.24.1 on Fedora Core 10 x64 by setting the Monitor Source Type to 'ffmpeg', then specifying the Source Path to rtsp://<ip>:7070

My Acti ACM-5611 video setup page contains;

Streaming Method:
TCP Only
Multicast Only
RTP Over UDP
RTP Over Multicast
RTP Over UDP & Multicast

Encoder Type:
MPEG4
MJPEG

Shouldn't one of those combinations produce a tcp mjpeg stream?

On my ACM-5611 I disabled RTSP Authen Enable on the camera itself, and it's happily streaming into a 1.24.1 box without patching my ffmpeg, or giving it any usernames.

zoneminder wrote:I have ACTi cameras working ok at the moment (though not tried the model you mention).

However there are the following provisos.
1) They require a username and password for streaming so if you want to use RTSP streaming you will need to apply the RTSP authentication patch from the Wiki to your ffmpeg.

Edit: It worked for the first day and a half. I didn't change any settings on the camera, or in zoneminder, have yet to determine what happened.

Another edit: Just switched the camera from MJPEG to MPEG4, and Zoneminder likes it again. Honestly couldn't say which I had it set to when it was working, but I'm quite certain that I didn't change the video settings when it stopped working.