ZoneMinder Forums

I just purchased a TRENDnet TV-IP311PI 3MP dome outdoor camera to replace an old Foscam FI8904W. It's a really nice piece of equipment, and PoE so I was able to get rid of an extension cable in the attic.

I was able to get the new camera working with ZM by using ffmpeg as the source and rtsp://username:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx//Streaming/Channels/1 for the source path. As I'm learning and reading, though, using ffmpeg instead of http/mjpeg uses a lot more resource intensive so the zmc process for that monitor is using a lot of CPU.

I've tried decreasing the framerate on the camera and the resolution in ZM (the camera will only send 1280x720, 1920x1080, or 2048x1536 in MPEG-4/rtsp mode so I told ZM to use 704x480). The camera also has a bewildering array of settings for video quality, bitrate, etc. but I can't seem to get ffmpeg CPU usage down.

Does anyone else have one of these cameras and happen to know the source path to use mjpeg over http? My Google searching has not been successful (but it was how I found the proper rstp source path in the first place). If not, any other suggestions on how to limit CPU usage?

After some more late-night tinkering, I was able to reduce the CPU usage. It turns out there are two RTSP streams available from the camera and the first string I found (Streaming/Channels/1) was the H.264 (HD) one. I am now using Streaming/Channels/2 which is the MJPEG stream so now I'm only sending across 704x480 video instead of 1280x720 so there's less work for ffmpeg to do and CPU usage for the zmc process is only 17% instead of 85%.

Of course, the video quality isn't as sharp, but it's good for my needs now. I don't suppose there's a way to switch to the H.264 high-quality stream during an alarm event? I know you can change framerate but it'd be cool to be able to switch resolutions as well.

Final question: how do I add this information to the wiki?

What FPS is the camera sending via the HD feed? I run a 1280x720 IP cam at 5 fps and its CPU usage is quite low but the server has a i7 950 CPU running at 4.2GHz so it has some grunt to spare. What CPU are you running?

The default is 15fps but I can change to just about anything on the camera side. My Linux "server" is an old Aspire Revo 3610 with a dial-core 1.6GHz Atom 330 CPU ... so a little less grunt than yours.