ZoneMinder Forums

I want to use a Raspberry Pi to monitor a single 720p IP camera and display that fullscreen. I don't need to record the video or anything else. Would Zoneminder be a good solution for this purpose?

Thanks,

Mike

rccsuser wrote:I want to use a Raspberry Pi to monitor a single 720p IP camera and display that fullscreen. I don't need to record the video or anything else. Would Zoneminder be a good solution for this purpose?

Thanks,

Mike

Personally, with what you're intending to do, I think I'd be trying out motion first:

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

I used it to stream USB webcams a couple of years back, and it's a very lightweight, simple but effective little package.
Not used it with an IP camera, although it's documented to support them.

If it's an IP Camera, and you don't want to record the output, what about a web browser running on the PI? In fact, some media player software may handle it, I wouldn't be surprised to find VLC could do it!

To monitor the output of an IP camera, that's all you need usually ...

Am I underthinking this?

Thanks, I'll look into this first!

BTW, this forum software kind of sucks... Got the error replying to your post because "Your post looks too spamy for a new user, please remove off-site URLs.", but it was the original post that had the URL in it, I was only replying to it...

c128 wrote:

rccsuser wrote:I want to use a Raspberry Pi to monitor a single 720p IP camera and display that fullscreen. I don't need to record the video or anything else. Would Zoneminder be a good solution for this purpose?

Thanks,

Mike

Personally, with what you're intending to do, I think I'd be trying out motion first:



I used it to stream USB webcams a couple of years back, and it's a very lightweight, simple but effective little package.
Not used it with an IP camera, although it's documented to support them.

That was precisely my original idea, but the guy that was working on this before me tried for weeks to get VLC working, but said it was pegging the CPU on the Pi and freezing the video. I'll go back to that if these other solutions don't work.

mikb wrote:If it's an IP Camera, and you don't want to record the output, what about a web browser running on the PI? In fact, some media player software may handle it, I wouldn't be surprised to find VLC could do it!

To monitor the output of an IP camera, that's all you need usually ...

Am I underthinking this?

rccsuser wrote: (VLC) was pegging the CPU on the Pi and freezing the video.

The camera will probably be returning something like Motion JPEG (older) or RTSP (newer) and there's no hardware acceleration for that on the PI, so it would all be software based. But that would be a problem for any software, not just VLC, if the Raspberry PI is underpowered, then it's underpowered

Firefox seems to handle MJPEG streams without any external help, but Firefox might be too fat for a Pi!

The cameras I'm using output MJPEG and H264. Can the Pi hardware decode H264? Thanks.

mikb wrote:

rccsuser wrote: (VLC) was pegging the CPU on the Pi and freezing the video.

The camera will probably be returning something like Motion JPEG (older) or RTSP (newer) and there's no hardware acceleration for that on the PI, so it would all be software based. But that would be a problem for any software, not just VLC, if the Raspberry PI is underpowered, then it's underpowered

Firefox seems to handle MJPEG streams without any external help, but Firefox might be too fat for a Pi!

rccsuser wrote:Can the Pi hardware decode H264? Thanks.

Maybe.

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/qu ... celeration

That link aside, it all depends on whether the stream from the camera can be handled directly into the hardware accelerator!

For example, ZoneMinder smashes everything up into JPGs and then reassembles it into videos, so you'd be out of luck expecting much hardware assistance, it's all CPU grunt work!

This is why I think a media player (that can handle an HTTP:// stream) and support for the hardware accel might be the way to go.

I got this working perfectly using Raspbmc. Thanks for all of your input!

nice - i'm going to try this out for two cameras and possibly recording..

surprised at how small the image was. did you then compile ZM from source?

I'm not sure if your post was directed at me or not. I ended up not using ZM at all but used Raspbmc instead. It doesn't do any recording to my knowledge, just displays the video.

multiplex wrote:nice - i'm going to try this out for two cameras and possibly recording..

surprised at how small the image was. did you then compile ZM from source?

gotcha - ok, guess i missed that part.

I was still hoping to use ZM with a Pi

thanks