ZoneMinder Forums

Hi guys,

I've been using zoneminder for a month now to service 8 network cameras and here are my experiences so far:

- Storage method for recorded frames is insanely inefficient.
- There's no support for multiple storage locations (so it would be possible to move old events to slower network storage with lots of space, keeping local drives available for current events)
- Sometimes events get created dated 1970-01-01 that last for insane amounts of time
- There seems to be some trouble with browsers. After some time spent watching two or three monitors, console stops refreshing and you can't open any new monitors, but at this same time there's no problem with accessing ZM with second browser (ie. firefox or chrome) from the same computer.

Did someone else happen to bump onto last problem, or is it something that only I'm experiencing?

Other than mentioned above, I'm happy with ZM so far - there are some quirks, but I'm not sure if there's even active development going on - seems like author lost his heart for ZM, because while browsing forums I've seen first two issues addressed by others and their patches didn't make it to main tree

Running ZM from apt on ubuntu.

Hiya

Storage inefficient? Not sure what you mean here, since jpgs are compressed and laid out logically? The deep filesystem has an alternate system if you don't like all the events for one monitor in ones spot.

Multiple storage. Mmm, the wiki has a post about moving them here. You can have a different place for each monitor easily enough by symlinking the directories. Because it's running on linux, each place can be on a local drive, nfs networked drive, usb drive, even mounted across the internet. The only limit is speed of connection. I generally put my events on a large local drive, leaving the root drive alone.

Don't know anything about 1970 dates. Not encountered that.

Browser montages. Yes. Firefox at least doesn't cope with concurrent mjpeg streams very well. In fact, since 2.x it doesn't cope with even single streams of mjpeg well, crashing frequently (although on some system's it can be stable). Chrome is a lot better with mjpeg. If more than 3 or 4 won't display, you'll probably need to up a setting in the browser that only a max number of streams from a single server. Personally, I use a static html file with <img> tags to the direct camera mjpeg feeds. Works fine, removes all extra load from the server and can be viewed by many at once.

The 1969 / 1970 (oddball) dated events are the result of a corrupted database; well covered in the forums with simple repair instructions, http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... atabase.3F. PHPmyadmin seems to be the method of choice.

Creating millions (literally) of jpeg files instead of throwing them together - I've seen patches that switch this over to mkv, but do they work?

To explain multiple storages better, I don't want to symlink monitors somewhere else, I just want to periodically move older events out of local drives to NFS-mounted high-capacity storage, yet still be able to access them from GUI should the need arise.

As to the browser part, it happens across all the browsers (IE, Opera, Firefox, Chrome) - looks like "connection leak", simultaneous connections get exhausted. Maybe something to do with Cambozola? But that doesn't explain browsers that don't rely on it to display the stream. Hm, I'll check if mpeg causes same behavior.

mysqlcheck doesn't report any errors, neither does phpmyadmin. I repaired the tables anyway with hope that this will fix the problem

Thanks for your answers and suggestions!