ZoneMinder Forums

Hey guys,

I've setup a ZM box using newvisionantenna's live DVD with 1.24.1 and everything was working fine the first day. I also had these same results using the bluecherry live CD. I am using an ACTI 5001 and an ACTI 3001 capturing at 3 fps. At night through the early morning, the fps dropped below 1 fps, and doesn't return to 3 until around 9:00a.m. Since the first night, frame rates still vary greatly on the cameras, and one is worse than the other. After it returns to the nearly correct fps, the images and stream alike are pixelated with horrible trailing. I've attached an example of whats going on. Has anybody seen this happen to their images? Also the quality wasn't that horrible and grainy until after the first night. Thanks

I would be looking at new cameras or finding a reboot button on them.

That's what I thought initially. Rebooting the cameras yields the same results. If you use the camera's web viewer, the images look fine. Also, the ACTI NVR software has recorded for weeks using the same cameras. It seems to be an issue that is only occuring with Zoneminder. The only resolution at the moment appears to be deleting the camera from Zoneminder and re-adding it.

Maybe the mpeg quality is being reduced at night then never returning maybe ffmpeg ether needs to be reset. or some how set the bitrate of the camera. Those look like low bit rate mpeg artifacts to me.

Saying all this I haven't used mpeg cameras yet.

This definately looks like an encoding issue. When you look at the stills for an event, do they have the same pixelation occuring? (this question makes a difference because video streaming to FireFox is either a series of jpegs or a streamed mpeg, and could be affected by your settings). Also, if that isn't the problem, there is a firmware dated 2009-11-23 (A1D-V3.11.13) for the ACTI 5001 and 3001, and that might improve your situation some if you haven't applied it already.

Did you get resolution to this problem. I have a ACM-5611 it gives me the same problem. If I look at the video using VLC it is OK, but once it goes into ZM that is where I appear to be getting the bad video. Looks like a malfunctioning cloaking device.... Right now I am just trying to figure out how to get jpg images out of it so I can at least get them up and going at a low frame rate using video that I know will be good. RTSP appears to be the issue and it appears to be on the ZM side, the stream as viewed in VLC is just fine.

Folks, I did a bit more poking at this one, I found that if I set my Max FPS and Alarm MAX FPS to the camera rate I got rid of the trailing pixel (looks like a malfunctioning cloaking device) issue. If the camera FPS and ZM FPS are not set at the same speed you will get this. Now the question is there a work around so as not to have to run ZM either at the lower speed or the higher speed and set the camera accordingly. I like to monitor at 5 FPS or lower, but I like to capture at 10 FPS (or faster if the customer insist)

Also I notice that my load has gone way up, it was running at about 0.5 or less (this is a dual core) now it is running at 3.2
Here are the settings for this camera on my zm system

The Source>General Screen


And the Source>Source screen

Any ideas?