Discussion to integrate X264 support

[jdhar]

There are a few threads on-going talking about x264 support, so I thought I would start something to condense information regarding some possible (not too far) future development...

Today, ZMS supports MJPEG and MPEG output such that basically the "watch" view creates an appropriate HTML wrapper and then ZMS just sends the output to stdout when called in a CGI application.

I think a good extension of this would be to support the creation of HTML-5 Video element to wrap x264 since that is what browsers are moving towards. What do you guys think?

I have this working in my XML plugin as it is today by using Pada's zstreamer piped to ffmpeg which is then piped to a HTML-5 segmenter. This approach is working, but I would like to integrate it all into ZMS so that we can all benefit from it by using it out of the XML plugin context, and use it in 'classic' ZM view.

What do you guys think about this path... any problems/points of contention? I will be contributing a lot in this arena in the coming few weeks, but would obviously benefit from the involvement from others.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I am doing this work as part of integrating H264 streaming into my eyeZm iPhone app as a feature, however, I'm contributing the code back to ZM of course and think it can benefit everyone the faster it gets done.

[curtishall]

We will have H.264 hardware compression cards available in January. While Zoneminder would have to be mostly rewritten to support the streams, you would save months of development time by using the H.264 stream that comes off the card and saving it in the proper container format that you need.

The MPEG-4 card information is here: http://support.bluecherrydvr.com/entrie ... eg-4-h-264 The H.264 card will function the same.

I've already emailed this information to Phil.

[jdhar]

We will have H.264 hardware compression cards available in January. While Zoneminder would have to be mostly rewritten to support the streams, you would save months of development time by using the H.264 stream that comes off the card and saving it in the proper container format that you need.

The MPEG-4 card information is here: http://support.bluecherrydvr.com/entrie ... eg-4-h-264 The H.264 card will function the same.

I've already emailed this information to Phil.

Curtis, not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but not everyone is going to buy a compression card just to support H264 streaming, nor is it necessary. And I don't think it will take months of rewriting. I was able to get H264 streaming in a day using an external pipe and existing ZM binaries, so to integrate that all into one isn't that much of a step.

Sure, it won't perform the same as streaming it natively from a compression card, but should be sufficient for viewing a stream or two at a time.

[jebba]

How do you view the stream without your iphone app? Is there a URL that could be fed to something like mplayer?

[jdhar]

How do you view the stream without your iphone app? Is there a URL that could be fed to something like mplayer?

The purpose of this discussion to implement support so that such things can be done (stream to mplayer for example). The stream cannot be viewed without the eyeZm application currently.

[grmela]

The h264 integration is getting really important these days. More and more cams are getting hires chips (720p or even 1080p) and streaming/recording these resolutions in mjpeg is problematic. We've currenty got one Axis Q6034-E connected to our test ZM install and we feel the load is pretty high for just one nodect ip cam. But that is not a problem, problem is the space the camera recordings are taking and the seek speed in the ZM GUI.

We hope the network load and space requirements will be a lot better with h264 therefore we're really looking forward to getting some support for this codec in the whole ZM.