Using remote systems with USB cameras

[outofculture]

Can I treat a running instance of zoneminder with a local usb camera as a remote camera source from another, central zoneminder system? What are the remote host path settings to get that to work? I tried using the url that seemed to function on its own as the live camera feed, but to no avail.

If this is possible and easy, should I push to get it documented on the wiki and/or included in the presets?

If I can't use zoneminder this way on the remote system, does alternate software exist to turn a usb camera into a network addressable video feed that zoneminder knows how to work with?

I read through a bunch of the forums looking for the answer to this, but I couldn't figure out any search terms that worked. Sorry if this is better answered already somewhere.

[kingofkya]

yes absolutely however it would be more effecent to use mjpeg-streamer on the remote notes and zoneminder only on the central server
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mjpg-streamer/

[outofculture]

Close, but it could be better.

That piece of software will probably work (after i give it a daemon and config file, and package it up for distribution), but i'm struck by an interest to make my zoneminder network distributed. My hardware is all recycled computers and usb cameras, of which I have many, so i can easily devote to this project a physical computer to each camera location. From that base, if each of those computers does the majority of its camera's processing, my central aggregate doesn't have to take on all that work.

So, while I may still move forward on using the mjpg-streamer, I would like someone to tell me how to point one zm at another's camera feed. I am still surprised that zoneminder doesn't have a preset choice to grab images from another zoneminder; it should be trivial.

[coke]

Code: Select all

Remote protocol: HTTP
Remote method: Simple
Remote host name: <your>
Remote host port: 80
Remote host path: /cgi-bin/nph-zms?mode=single&monitor=1&scale=100&maxfps=5&buffer=1000
Remote host subpath: blank
Make sure the color, width, and height are appropriate.

Works great for me forwarding a few analogs that were too far to run cable to the main ZM box, but were nearby a network switch.

I'm not sure this would accomplish the goal (easily) of having the remote hosts "do most of the work", if you're suggesting they handle the motion detection, I'm not sure how the main ZM server would handle sometimes getting images and sometimes not. Might have to send triggers from one to the other. Actually, setting the remote machine to modetect will still send a live stream to the server, so you'd definitely need to setup some sort of trigger to tell the main host to start recording.

[outofculture]

Ha! The only thing I was missing for that was the forward slash at the beginning of the path. Okay, I'll put this onto the wiki and submit a patch to have it included in the presets.

As for the distributed-ness, you're right that I'll have to set up a motion-triggered on/off of the monitoring on each remote host. I'll post with my configuration settings once I figure that out.

Thanks.