ZoneMinder Forums

Recently I have seen some sony "effio" CCD cameras which apparently have higher resolution (650-700TV). This is supposed to give better quality. Has anyone tried them working with zoneminder? Due to their high resolution, I am not sure if there are any limitation in using them with zoneminder.

I was planning at using a Connexant 8 chip BT878 dvr card. Will the higher resolution work with this dvr card.

Thanks

Hi blazingice3, I have one of those cameras (ebay, title "IR Vandal Dome Camera 3.6mm, EFFIO 1/3" SONY CCD 700TVL" from seller videocamerasecurity). I am using it with the card described in this post http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... hilit=ebay, and I followed the configuration instructions shown there. I just started using it today, so far so good. I only have that camera and one Creative NX Pro webcam (my starter camera). Since things are looking good I plan to add more of the EFFIO cameras.

At first the video was blinking on and off slowly and erratically. All I needed to do was to reboot with the camera attached and all was fine.

I am using ZoneMinder 1.22.2 Live CD installed to hard disk on a 10 year old Dell Dimension 8100 with a Pentium 4 and 1 GB RAM.

The camera has many menu options and I'll need to do some tuning but the default settings will get you going. I connected it to a TV first to verify that it worked. For $79 I think this camera is a good deal.

I'll post again after I know more.

Any update on the best settings for these camera's?

I picked up a couple this week to replace some older B&W cams.

They seem to work out of the box with BTTV 640x480, but I haven't tried capturing anything yet.

Paul

ZM won't see this camera or any camera of this type only the capture card you use as an interface for it; that's the key!

I get the capture card part, I have had a working zone minder installation for many years. I am looking for any tips on configuring ZM with these types of cameras

I have various types of analogue cameras attached to my system and the Sony Effio cameras are definitely better quality than the standard 540TVL cameras and probably equal to one of the Samsung cameras I have.

I have two identical dome cameras with the only difference being one is 540TVL and the other has a Sony Effio chipset and under low light conditions (switching to B&W) they are significantly better. It also doesn't suffer from being washed out as easily by direct sunlight.

It's currently set up on ZM with a BT878 card at 384x288. I don't think analogue capture cards work much better at other resolutions.

I also just recently purchased an Effio Sony 700TVL camera. I am also using it with a generic Connexant 8 chip BT878 card. Its working well here at 720X480 resolution.

I had to play a bit to get the color resolution to work. I was getting some odd "static" until I upped the memory.

I've also replaced my stock Optex camera boards with newer 650TVL boards and those too are working well with ZM. It was just a bit of recabling/soldering to get these to work.

Curious what other folks have tried regarding different pixel resolutions?

Wondering too if there is a way to change from grey at night to color during the day with a ZM script. BTW I am using ZM 1.24.2, Ubuntu 11.03, on a core duo with 4Gb of memory right now. Upping it to a quad core shortly.