MegaPixel Cameras

[Korak]

We have an old system here at our school. It has about 5 cameras and they are all coaxial cameras. We had a demonstration of some of the megapixel security cameras and I really liked the resolution that they provided and also how that lets you zoom in on the recorded data without losing a lot of resolution.

I decided to see if I could replace some of the old cameras with these megapixel camers, but it seems they are all ethernet and will not work with our old system.

I was looking at Zoneminder and had a couple of questions. I hope that I ask the correct things, because I am a bit of a noob when it comes to camera stuff like this.

1. Will zoneminder work fine with megapixel cameras?

2. How many cameras can I hook to one Zoneminder machine? (I'll be looking in the documenation too)

3. Anyone know the best place to find some of these cameras for a decent price? (I think the quote that i got from a company was around $1600/camera)

Here were the cameras quoted.

http://www.ipcamerasupply.com/arecont-av8180

Thanks for any info.
Scott

[Korak]

From the wiki, it looks like the megapixel cameras will work. They are talking about a 1.3MP camera and the one I was looking at is 8MP camera. I don't figure that will matter, but will probably just take up more bandwidth and HDD space.

If I am wrong then let me know. Now I wish I had one of each camera and Zoneminder setup to be able to see the difference in the two.

Thanks again.
Scott

[Blazer]

The MP doesn't matter so much as the resolution of the captured frames. The highest resolution I have used with ZM is 960x720. Higher resolutions require more CPU to deal with, and subsequently more disk space and shared memory required.

ZM works fine with network cameras, I do not forsee any problems you would have.

[coke]

The MP doesn't matter so much as the resolution? That's good to know, I've been thinking for years that they were different words for the same thing.

[knight-of-ni]

Arecont makes some very high resolution cameras. The images are great, but as already mentioned you have to watch the bandwidth and cpu usage.

I wouldn't expect Zoenmidner to be the limiting factor in how many mega pixels you can have or how many cameras you can use at once. The limiting factor will likely be the hardware you run Zoneminder on. On their website, Arecont advertises the 8180 as the equivalent of 24 analog cameras so to oversimplify take that to mean you need a server fast enough to handle that many analog cameras per Arecont camera. Note that I do not know if these cameras will work with Zoneminder.

We installed a few of the AV8180's and AV8360's in a local school district (sorry, we didn't use Zoneminder to record). The thing to note is that these two models of cameras are literally four independent cameras stuffed into a single housing (the camera does use just a single IP address however).

Consequently, it is just like looking at four different cameras within your recording software. To use Zoneminder semantics... it will appear as four different monitors... you will have to manually line up all four images by hand on your computer screen if you are looking to get a full 180 degree panoramic view.

The megapixel rating of a camera is simply the max number of pixels it can put out. To get a camera's mexapixel rating, just multiply the max width by the max height.

For example, the Arecont 8180 has a max resolution of 1600x1200 for each of it's four sensors. When we do the math we get:

1600 x 1200 = 1920000 pixels = ~2 megapixels per sensor
1920000 pixels x 4 = 7680000 pixels = ~8 megapixels per 8180

As you can see manufacturers tend to round up their ratings.

Hopefully this info was of some help. Having done an installation with these cameras I can share additional Arecont specific info if you are interested, but it would probably be best done outside of this thread.

[kingofkya]

The MP doesn't matter so much as the resolution of the captured frames. The highest resolution I have used with ZM is 960x720. Higher resolutions require more CPU to deal with, and subsequently more disk space and shared memory required.

I run my axis cameras higher 1025x768 than that the trick is to use record or offload motion detection to the camera via tcp/ip triggers.

[johnnytolengo]

I also want to do motion,record, etc with ZM and megapixel cameras in full resolution

Why ZM has not a workarround to do that?

How we can improve ZM to process Mpix. ?

How we can to do that in Linux or at least record?


Thanks.

J.

[curtishall]

I also want to do motion,record, etc with ZM and megapixel cameras in full resolution

Why ZM has not a workarround to do that?

How we can improve ZM to process Mpix. ?
How we can to do that in Linux or at least record?
Thanks.

J.

There's not much you can do to optimize the way that Zoneminder handles video. Zoneminder takes one frame, decodes it, analyzes it and then saves it disk. This is fine for 320x240 and 640x480 images, but when you start poking at 3 or 5MP images Zoneminder isn't going to be able to keep up with more then one camera.

Offloading the motion detection by using on-camera triggering will help _alot_, but another bottle neck is going to be saving each image instead of one solid stream.

[johnnytolengo]

Yes, I know that ZM is not created to work with top image resolutions.

Would be good a ZM option to save some monitors in avi,mp4 formats.

Is it posible to do that in Linux? How?

Thanks.

J.

[johnnytolengo]

Dead thread nobody wants IP megapixel cameras.

[mitch]

As long as you have a nice raid array for drives and enough processing power you can handle megapixel cameras without issue. The tricks to have ZM doing the motion detection are to keep the zones as small as possible, switch to not possibly analyzing every frame, and jpeg optimization libraries.

Short of that to get larger performance gains you would most likely have to do some larger rewriting of ZM itself.

[coke]

Personally, I wouldn't mind more megapixel IP cameras, mine are all working fine with zoneminder, though the motion detection was offloaded to the cameras. IO's probably the biggest issue, you want/need a raid.