ZoneMinder Forums

So I'm new to ZM, having gotten involved in salvaging an existing, poorly cobbled together camera system based on a geovision card (It spent a lot of time crashing). The geovision is being sold and will more than pay for the replacement parts that are being used for ZM.

I have a decent amount of linux experience, so the command line is no threat to me, but I did opt to use the bluecherry liveCD to install the system, for simplicity's sake learning a new app (hence posting in the 1.22 area) The machine in question is a new intel 945 board with a pentium dual-core chip (2GHz) and 2GB ram. The 250GB IDE drive was the only leftover part that matters. I got the PV-155 from bluecherry, and it has nine cameras connected to it, two to a chip, and three on one. This worked once I figured out how the dongle connectors are laid out and used the 77 option in options.conf or wherever to enable all the cams.
I've spent a good deal of time in the wiki and in these forums, and I have a few questions regarding an assortment of performance anomalies.

I hate to make this any longer, but I want to anticipate as many questions as possible. The cameras are all set to capture at 320x240, RGB24, up to 15fps. Load at the ZM console *on localhost* (in X) seems to float between .5 and 2.5, depending what's going on. top reports ~20% cpu usage and about 640MB ram in use with X running and firefox open viewing a camera. The zones on the cameras are all default, 4 are monitor and 5 are set to modect. The only hardware suspect I really have is the hard drive. I've used firefox about:config settings from the wiki for viewing on localhost, and I've installed the upgraded jpeg libs (MMX support).

So my first question relates to simply viewing the cams. The machine is in an office, and they're used to using it as a monitor at all times. In this respect I may have made a questionable choice going with ZM, but it seems that the hardware should be able to handle running, say, the montage on screen during the day. The firefox settings from the wiki seemed to help, but I'm still having occasional hiccups, say loading 7/9 in the montage, or failure to load a cam when scaling to 3x. Viewing over the network from the other machine in the office works most of the time, but also fails to load the full montage at times, and surprisingly often fails to connect at all, especially if the montage is active on the local machine. Am I beating the disk to death here or what? Are there tweaks to be done to apache?

Second question is frame rates. Let me point out that this is a perception problem as much as anything, 5fps is acceptable from a security standpoint, but these people are coming from a geovision system getting 10-15fps in a montage view (with the same chips). I guess I'm saying this isn't *my* disappointment, but I am curious why it happens. From my understanding of the specs of these chips, with 2 cams/chip they should be capable of 15fps. I could see 7-10 with overhead, but 5? And then 2fps with the option to stop the "bounce" of the image (ZM_I can't recall). If they really care that much we'll add another capture card, it has already been discussed, but I'm wondering if I can milk another 2-3fps out of it somehow? I've read threads in the forum on 16-port cards, so I'm not incredibly optimistic here.

So if anyone has an idea or two about these things, I'd love to hear it, in the meantime I need to read more about zone definitions.

thanks

its the bttv driver that controls framereate and runs your card so any increases will come from here not zm.
But if you want 15 fps you need a chip per cam.

Also running the web i/f on the server is a bad idea. If you want local monitoring then look at the shared mem viewer. You will have issues running firefox for extyended periods.

Aha, there's a local viewer? I hadn't seen this. I was concerned that FF 1.5 would eventually blow up. I'll go hunting, seems that most of the search results are for actual memory issues though, any pointers?

I figured another card would come into play, and like I say it's already been discussed/approved. Are there any caveats to adding a card? I'm guesssing it would just become /dev/video4-7?