ZoneMinder Forums

At first I had ERR ['zmc -d /dev/video0' exited abnormally, exit status 6] problem, but I increased the shared memory, and now I am getting ERR ['zmc -d /dev/video0' exited abnormally, exit status 255 messages from zmdc.log. I looked through the forums, and while other people have had this problem, nobody seems to have been able to fix it. Does anybody have any ideas on this?

Thers nox fix because its user error. you have something in you camera settings incorect.

kingofkya wrote:Thers nox fix because its user error. you have something in you camera settings incorect.

Can you tell me what I need to do to fix it? I have most of the settings from zmu, listed below, except for the palette. I have all tried of the palette options. None of them work. Grey gives me exit status 6, while all of the others 255. I also occasionally get a "cant find process with command of zma -m 1" error:

I was in the same boat, I just frigged with the setting until I finally got it. Then the cameras kept switching channels, crashes, etc.

The error reporting in zoneminder is abysmal; and not much support from the group either... keep friggin' with the setting or just go on ebay and buy a black box solution (unless you want to turn this into some sort of hobby, I'd suggest the black box solution - it'll save you time money and grief).

"it'll save you time money and grief" for those who can't or won't read the documentation.
elitenoobboy: your problem is probably your palette or camera format choice. Try lowering your resolution to 320 X 240 and explore the palette options making sure that you give each the time it takes to use up the warm up frames time before trying another. Also are you sure your cameras are PAL and not NTSC? 255 is always a settings issue! Also captures per frame might be useful to you, the basic documentation can walk you through each of these settings plus in the options section hovering over the "?" will give you a complete description of each setting. Be persistent, this is not a Chinese $100 box but full on, rock solid security camera software that allows for a lot of different hardware so your configuration is the key. If your not already, try one of RDMelin's live CD's available over at Linuxtracker.org; they are generally easy to install and configure with the latest presets for popular hardware.

I got the camera working. I was looking in some other logs and saw something about shared memory. I thought I had already fixed that, but apparently not. The command that finally solved the problem was this:
echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmall
echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

Even after putting the commands in and having the camera start working, it looks like zmwatch is still putting out a bunch of shared memory errors:
06/18/2010 17:02:02.285728 zmwatch[2305].ERR [Can't get shared memory id '8e6d0001', 1: No such file or directory]

The error reporting in zoneminder is abysmal; and not much support from the group either... keep friggin' with the setting or just go on ebay and buy a black box solution (unless you want to turn this into some sort of hobby, I'd suggest the black box solution - it'll save you time money and grief).

Yep. The thing is, I want to be able to access it easily over the web as well. The shared memory thing just shouldn't happen either. Who even still uses "shared memory"? That sounds like something that you would run into in DOS. I just think it needs more development for things like this. At least more that it has going on right now...[/quote]

Could be that the settings need to be higher, someone posted a formula for setting exactly what the setting should be for resolution, fps, palette, etc. I believe once you've got that set, editing /etc/sysctl.conf will make it permanent. What you ask for in remote access is done by a lot of users, including remote administration. I'm sure in the change log for 1.24 mapped memory is available and will eventually replace shared all together (?).

That brings the support out of the woodwork

Actually 255 is very generic and doesn't point to anything specific. Without a lot of sleuthing on your part there's really not much help that can be offered.

First - it's good to see someone jumping in to help this persons request. After time "friggin'" with this, I learned error 255 was a catchall for any (most?) errors from an ungraceful exit from the monitor/driver communication.

Speaking to the developers... Couldn't more information be documented from the ungraceful exit? Maybe all drivers, hw return something different... but is there any generic string, or error information that is driver/hw specific that could be passed back and added to the error report from this event?

... sorry to the original poster... don't mean to hijack your thread...

1) Try 320x240 as a resolution.

2) Make sure you create a modprobe file and set you capture card information... what card do you have? What OS? If it's debian based (such as ubuntu) create a file in the directory /etc/modprobe.d... call it <whatever>.conf.
(my settings are...
alias char-major-81 bttv
options bttv card=0x85,0x84,0x85,0x85 radio=-1 tuner=4 pll=0)

3) Set shared memory. Using sudo gedit (or vi if you're old school like me), edit /etc/sysctl.conf... add the line

kernel.shmmax = 167772160

4) Try different palletes.


I'm just a newb though, but these are the things that I manged to tweak and get it "sort of" working. I suspect I have a crappy card though, so I'd only blame zoneminder for the lack of error reporting detail.

i have same problem on a SA7134 card. my solution was to set up : MAX_RESTART_DELAY to 1 i still get the 255 error but at least now i dont get red sources. cheers