ZoneMinder Forums

I am new to zm, and so far I am thrilled with it! I have three separate installations up now. One of them is for a friend of mine who owns a small warehouse business. The system is eight analog cams feeding an 8-port card from bluecherry.net. The zm server is sitting in the one-and-only office for the building, so there is always someone within earshot of the server machine. So we decided to try to get audio alerts directly out of the server’s soundcard instead of relying on a browser session to be up and running all the time to play an alert sound. We wanted an audible alert when someone walks in the front door, or when a truck pulls up to the back loading dock. I’v seen vague references in this forum to using the zmtrigger script to do this, but haven’t seen anybody actually explain how. Additionally, I would prefer to do this in a stand-alone script so that I’m not modifying any of the distributed zm package scripts. This way, upgrading zm would not overwrite my mods to zmtrigger.pl.

So I sat down with my meager perl skills (C and php are more my speed) and hammered-out a script that forms an interface between “zmuâ€

That's great and an interesting way to go about it.
You might want to poke about the ZoneMinder perl modules as you can get monitor status though them. But this in it's self looks good.