ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I am new here having found ZM when looking into buying an IP camera. I am also by no means an expert with Linux, getting a bit lost when moving into command line mode, though I can follow instructions fine. It is just I do not know all of the commands off by heart.

I installed ZM on a test CentOS 5.4 box and attached to a firend's Panasonic BL-C140 over the www to get to grips with the programme. I have to say I am well impressed!!

For a variety of reasons I ended up buying a Y-Cam Black SD and installed a monitor for that alongside the Panasonic monitor, with the Y-Cam on my LAN of course. Again, all ran fine, apart from getting too many events as i was using only the default "all" zone.

Feeling confident I added ZM to my Scalix e-mail/webserver CentOS 5.4 box, running on a Dell Inspiron with 1GB RAM, AMD64 Dual Core Processor 3800+ and 160GB HDD with about 100GB free space. Again everything ran smoothly and I was a happy bunny ready to experiment with zones etc (well, for a while I was).

I am not sure if I did something but things began to go a little pear-shaped. In the end I decided to start from a clean CentOS install, so rebuilt the machine with CentOS 5.4, Scalix Collaboration Suite and ZM following the ZM CentOS Wiki very carefully. I reloaded the Scalix mailboxes and websites to get me back to where i thought I had been before the problems. This seemed to solve the issues but again only for a while.

I still have both IP cameras connected and the Panasonic way off across the www seems fine on monitor m2 but my Y-Cam on my LAN on m4 (I started off with m1 and m2 but have deleted a couple of monitors as I have tried to track down my probs) is irratic to say the least.

I have trawled this forum and seem to have all the problems people experience from the 01/01/1970 (in my case) dated events with negative duration, through no events being triggered/recorded, to all sorts of errors in the messages log file. These include Backtraces, exited abnormally and others.

What is strange is that I can do a service restart on ZM and solve or do not solve the evet triggering or get periods where events suddendly stop being triggered/recorded and then start again without any intervention. So far I cannot recognise any pattern.

As mentioed above, I have done a complete OS reinstall, deleted and recreated monitors and played with zones, sensitivities and buffers but nothing has solved the issues or helped me narrow down the problems.

I am now at a complete loss as to "where next" to track down my problems, which I am sure relate to one error somehwere causing a cascade of problems.

I am also at something of a loss as to what to actually post here in terms of extracts from the logs, so this note is really a cry for help and a request for "where do I/we start" to get to a solution.

If possible I would like to avoid having to re-install CentOS and Scalix again as that takes a few hours and is a pain.

The only saving grace at the moment is that the Y-Cam is happily recoding everything onto its SD card, but that is not where I want to be as i think ZM is a far more comprehensive package.

It has crossed my mind that the fact that I am capturing on the SD card in the camera itself and therfore have zones in the camera triggering its events might be part of the problem but I simply don't have enough experience with ZM to call that one. (I cannot remeber whether the above issues start before or after I started recording to the camera's SD card)

Anyway, I hope this has captured the attention of everyone who likes to get their teeth into little imponderables like this.

Cheers

Gary

Hi guys,

Am I being too generalistic or missing something to generate interst in this one?

I appreciate what the sticky says but have tried to give a starter for 10...

Thanks

Gary

lol

id suggest its cam / path related.

are you limiting fps at the cam or the box?

Thanks.

I think the only place to set frames by camera is under "Maximun FPS" on the entry page for a camera. I have left this blank.

Indeed I haven't really changed many options. On the camera set-up:

General - remote and modect
Source - Regexp (changed to this based on this forum), /stream.jpg (stream for the Y-Cam), 24 bit, 640 x 480
Buffers - 65, 25, 30, 50, 1000, 1 (from top to bottom)

In options I don't think I have changed any settings this time from the clean install.

I just have this nagging thought that the alarm function and recording to SD card on the camera might be one variable too many so have just turned that off to make sure (no idea whether this could interfere in some way)

Gary

garyc wrote:
I just have this nagging thought that the alarm function and recording to SD card on the camera might be one variable too many so have just turned that off to make sure (no idea whether this could interfere in some way)

Gary

It shouldn't impact the triggers (motion detection?) because that is simply based on a difference in the image from the last one. So regardless of what the remote camera is doing with the image before you get it, it will compare the two and report motion.

So no matter how much motion you get it sometimes doesn't trigger?

If its remotely query-able and you're willing to share the login info then I could hit it from a ZM instance residing on a VPS that is working fine with other remote cameras. And we can see if motion detection is picked up by that system.

if your not limiting fps maybe the cam has issues with the framerate your requesting.

If using jpg grab then limit in zm. If using mpjeg then limit on the cam.

Thanks. I'll do some testing and see what happens over a day or so.

Not sure why but it now seems to be working normally and without errors in the logs. Why? I have no idea!

I tuened off motion detection in the camera itself and reduced FPS to 10 from 20. I then setup a new monitor in ZM and ran it alongside the original monitor for a couple of days. The new one was error free but the original continued to crash.

I assume there was a problem with the old monitor though I have no idea what as its parameters were identical to the new one, apart from the zone which I had begun to modify to reduce false events.

Anyway, I seem to be back up and running and can now think again about tweaking the default settings.

Thanks for your help and suggestions - somehting obviously work!!!

Gary