ZoneMinder Forums

Greetings,

Long time fan, first time user of the message board.

I have one of those cheap bt874 4 channels, but 25 fps shared for all channels, cards. It's usually not a problem, since most of the time I need 1 fps anyway (noone is that fast, rigtht?) But out of 4 cameras, 1 is used on eye level at the door to get a nice portrait of the face of person entering the studio. Unfortunately, 1FPS is not enough in that case and most of the time, the camera is not quick enough to record the person in question.

I've been playing with the settings a few times now, but no matter what I put in as "Max FPS" and "Alarm Max FPS" in my door camera, I always get the same speed as all my other cameras. In fact, the number of recorded frames (I use Modetect setting) is usually half of the duration of the event, which would mean I get 0.5 FPS.

I have also played with V4L_MULTIBUFFER settings (it's now off) and CAPTURES_PER_FRAME (it's set to 4).

Is it possible to record at different FPS from different cameras on a card that shares it's FPS between channels? What is the maximum reliable FPS I can get on a card that has 25 FPS shared between 4 channels and which settings do I use for V4L_MULTIBUFFER and CAPTURES_PER_FRAME?

Thank you for your help!

Leave multibuffer off and lower captures per frame to 2. That should give you 3 fps across 4 cameras.

bb99 wrote:Leave multibuffer off and lower captures per frame to 2. That should give you 3 fps across 4 cameras.

I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

I recenty discovered something about zoneminder v1.24.4.

I was having problems with 3 cameras where I would set the FPS in the zoneminder console, and I would also set a smaller area to monitor in the Zone section, and suddenly some of the cams that had been working fine would go red in the console. Or sometimes, the camera would work fine after setting it up, only to find the camera went red (offline) by the next day.

Well, after playing around and reading posts from others, I found its best not to define any FPS in the ZM console for any of the cameras. And, its best not to define smaller zone areas.

What you do is adjust the FPS in the cameras instead, and leave the FPS boxes in the ZM console blank. Also, leave the motion areas in the zones alone so that they watch the entire picture area and instead, adjust the sensitivity for the zone if it captures too many events.

Once this was done, I found I could easily get the cameras working at up to 30fps @ 640x480 res. (for those cams that could handle it) The cams are from different manufacturers and each has an FPS rate that works best for it, so it takes a small bit of trial and error...