ZoneMinder Forums

This seems to be a popular topic.
I am at the point where I think I'm just going to spring for a real DVR for my cameras; have only a 3ghz cpu with only a single PCI slot and maxxed it out with my 4 camera video card - 4 cams at 1fps - so picked up a Pixord network camera on Ebay so to expand the system.

zmc just drives the system (and me) crazy with it's cpu usage. System has variable speed fans and I can hear them going on and off as ZMC cycles up and down.

Didn't seem to matter if net cam was set to Monitor or Modect.
I disabled the network cam and it's quiet again with my 4 cameras at 1fps.

Will leave the Pixord on, but will just monitor it over network without ZM. Unfortunately, will have to open a port on my Netscreen router.

Have read here where network cameras use considerably more cpu but didn't think it would be so bad.

Just posting for information

Thanks,

Jim

Well hers what happens

Analog --> Rawimage --> analyze raw image --> encode jpeg -->write to disk

Network cam --> encode jpeg -->send over tcp/ip stack -->recive over tcp/ip stack --> decode jpeg --> analyze raw image --> encode jpeg -->write to disk

hers what i do that healpes a lot use record or go to the network cam settings and set skip frames so it is only checking for motion at 1 fps so on a 10fps cam set skip frames to 9.

This seems like an obvious trick, but I just had a situation with zmc hogging my cpu (20% for zmc, another 20% taken by zma if it's running - because of modect mode), and I was able to solve it.

I investigated and my IP cam somehow was capturing at 30 fps. I've been running this setup for a while, and I don't remember the high cpu usage before, and I don't think the frame rate was set that high.

I don't know how it got that way, but I turned it down to 3fps max (10 fps alarm), and zmc is not hammering my cpu anymore.

Bill