Capturing images every 5 minutes ?

Forum for questions and support relating to the 1.24.x releases only.
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wojteksci
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2007 1:34 pm
Location: Poland

Capturing images every 5 minutes ?

Post by wojteksci »

Hi!

I want use ZoneMinder to capture images from cameras every 5 minutes.

It's necessary for my boss - documenting new headquarter build.

It's possible?

Thanks!
bb99
Posts: 943
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2008 12:04 am

Re: Capturing images every 5 minutes ?

Post by bb99 »

Click on the source column for the camera, on the general tab change maximum frame rate to a value less then 1 (i.e. a .5 value will yield 1 frame per two seconds). 0.0033 should be close; do the math and time the setup to verify.
Flasheart
Posts: 342
Joined: Thu Jul 06, 2006 2:27 pm

Re: Capturing images every 5 minutes ?

Post by Flasheart »

I did exactly this for our new office build, and afterwards created a 2 minute film of the whole process.

I didn't use zm.

The stages.

1. Capture sequentially named jpgs from a camera every x minutes (I think I used 10, but 5's good too). I did this by using crontab to call a small perl script which looked at the directory, found the highest numbered file, then fetched a new jpg and saved it as highest_number + 1.jpg. I was using a solidly mounted Axis ip cam.

2. Backup the jpgs!

3. Deleted all the night time jpgs. Just viewed the big directory full of thumbnails and deleted all the dark ones. You can leave this if you want the artistry, but I found it distracting, wasteful and sometimes quite headache inducing.

4. Ran ffmpeg to convert the directory full of files into an avi. It took a few attempts to drop several frames to get the desired film length.


The resulting film was very well received by all who saw it, especially the estonian construction crew. We had a big language barrier but this was a nice way to say thank you, and I gave them all copies of it to take home.


You could do this with zm, and would cut a lot of the stages out, but you'd probably end up with several movies, but they could be stitched together fairly easily afterwards.
wojteksci
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2007 1:34 pm
Location: Poland

Re: Capturing images every 5 minutes ?

Post by wojteksci »

bb99 wrote:Click on the source column for the camera, on the general tab change maximum frame rate to a value less then 1 (i.e. a .5 value will yield 1 frame per two seconds). 0.0033 should be close; do the math and time the setup to verify.
I've tried but it doesn't work good. Sometimes recording stopping (in log "Waiting for capture daemon") another time web interface is not available :-(

With continous recording all work good.

What command I can use for capturing images (for configured monitors) using cron ?
Flasheart
Posts: 342
Joined: Thu Jul 06, 2006 2:27 pm

Re: Capturing images every 5 minutes ?

Post by Flasheart »

I forget my method, probably done in perl - but a quick google brings this - and many others which may help;

http://www.streamreader.org/serverfault ... -extension
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