ZoneMinder Forums

I have a dedicated nas box for my zoneminder install. 3600gb usable storage. I'm was recording on mocord setting for all 24 at 30fps and you've never seen hd space fill up so fast. I used it all up within a few hours.

So... I really don't want to do just modect, I use that at my house and have found it does miss things sometimes and the 24-camera system I'm working on now is at an office building where there's going to be CONSTANT motion anyway. Can I just set it to mocord at 15fps and 30fps on alarm or event or what would be the recommended way to go about it?

I have a beefy enough server... it's a Dual Quad Core Opteron @ 3.0ghz with 16gb ram and multiple bonded gigabit links for load balancing.

I just need to figure a way to still be able to record everything and not eat up so much disk space so quickly.

Thanks for any help...

That is quite a chunk...

Simplest method is reduce size of images or number of images.

Size: Can reduce jpg quality in zoneminder or off the camera if it supports it, but generally not a good idea. When you want stuff, you want it clear.

Another way of doing the above is to use greyscale images. Much less space, almost as clear.

I would simply reduce the fps, and this is what I do. I run around 3-5 fps for modect (1-2 for record). You get a jerky playback but a lot more. That's fps globally, not just for record. Lowers cpu load and makes slowly-moving targets actually more visible to zm.

It takes experimentation and balancing, but you can do the math just by checking the average filesize of an event. I tend to aim for 2 weeks on a 1tb drive for around ten cams per low-end server, half record, half modect.

So on mocord you'd do 3-5fps? Is that sufficient so I wouldn't miss something important?
On each camera's settings in zoneminder it has Maximum FPS and Alarm Maximum FPS. (Mine's set at 30FPS on each for all cameras at the moment) What's the difference anyway?

Other questions I have is I'm currently using RTP/Unicast and it seems to work fine, but is there a better way or is that ok?

My cameras will allow me to specify:
Frame Size (Currently 640x480)
Maximum Frame Rate (Currently 30FPS)
Intra Frame Period <- Whatever that is. (Currently 1 S)
Constant Bit Rate [Ranges from 20kbps to 4mbps) -- Disabled
Fixed Quality [Ranges from Medium to Excellent] (Currently on Excellent)
On the fixed quality setting anything much below excellent results in a somewhat blurry image.

They also allow me to specify if I want the feed to be MPEG-4 or JPEG, It's currently set to MPEG-4.

See anything that I could change to either improve the image quality or add recording time without crippling image quality ?

All I can say is that it works for me. It depends a lot on camera positioning and quality, obviously with more fps you have a greater chance of capturing "THE" still that will result in a prosecution... Some experimentation needed with walktests etc.

I use jpg or mjpeg on all cameras that support it - as I understand it zm uses ffmpeg to translate MPEG4 feeds into .jpgs anyway so there is a significant processing overhead on the server.

It's all about striking the right balance between "OMG, too much information to store" and ensuring you have clear enough images to make the system useful.

You think 5fps is sufficient @ 640x480?
I'm doing 30fps now so it should drop my load a lot and disk space used...

go for 10fps or 15fps, its half u doing right now anyways

i say that 10fps its more than enough

5 or 10fps seems fine... this has dramatically reduced disk usage.. thanks!

And how do you do 30fps monitor, but 10fps record? How many "skipframes" do you need to specify?

I'm not... Everything is 5fps right now..

DREMA wrote:And how do you do 30fps monitor, but 10fps record? How many "skipframes" do you need to specify?

Hi, I'm looking to build a system ASAP. I really would like 8 ch at 640x480 res.
Can you please post you DVI make and model and your camera models.
Thanks

I personally I have configured a dual core server with 8 gb of ram and 750 gb hd. Debian etch with kernel bigmem (to use all the ram). I have 22 cameras set up. If it is true that I have important cameras at 640x480 no limit fps, but I have less important at lower resolution limit of 5 fps. I can have 10 cameras at high resolution and 12 with lower resolution but it looks pretty good.
My hard drive if it lasts me two weeks without being filled, but I have him as part of the filter to delete when you get to 90% ...

Greetings.