ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I've running ZM 1.28.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 however I'm unable to export events to video. I get video generation failure message.
I've set my system up using the issac connor build and followed the official instructions. I've ticked is the ffmpeg video encoder/decoder installed, however the path to (optional) ffmpeg mpeg encoder is blank.
Am I missing something?

Biggus wrote: however the path to (optional) ffmpeg mpeg encoder is blank.
Am I missing something?

Ummm, at the risk of stating the obvious, you could be missing the path to the ffmpeg binary?

"/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg" on my system, you need the full path including the name of the binary, not just the folder/directory ...

For Ubuntu 14.04 use:

/usr/bin/avconv

Solved that worked thank you very much.

One question why isn't this filled in as default after a new install?

"You've put it in the wrong box"

PATH_FFMPEG is /usr/bin/avconv
FFMPEG_INPUT_OPTIONS is for guidance to FFMPEG on how you want your video processing, regarding the input file
FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS similar for the output file from FFMPEG.

It's not filled in by default as nobody knows what you've installed on your system, and it's optional. You want it, you set it.

On my system I have 3 different FFMPEGs, for various scripts that require a certain version before things changed and broke things. How would ZM know which to use?

check that /dev/random is set to 755

Sorry my screenshot was wrong above in fact I did place it in the PATH_FFMPEG box.
Here are my perssions for the /dev/random folder do they need changing?

Not sure what the permissions on /dev/random comment was about, perhaps @rockedge could explain -- mine are set exactly as yours.

"755" would make /dev/random an executable file, which in itself seems a bit "random" ... to use the modern usage of the word.

"crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 Oct 20 14:13 /dev/random"

I will try to explain. I am using a Puppy Linux derivative Tahr 6.0.5 and I needed information sometime ago discussing a problem with ZoneMinder running on a new version of the Hiawatha sever. So I asked the author of Hiawatha on his forum why the new Hiawatha server was not starting and and he told me to try to change the permissions of the /dev/random , here are the reasons for that https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/forum/topic/1860

So while I was trying to figure out small bugs, one of which was the video generation not working. I was also installing a version on a machine running Hiawatha and I noticed after changing the permissions of the /dev/random that the video generation worked. So on the Tahr 6.0.5 install (which is Ubuntu based) I did and removed the -r 25 from options>Images>FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS and BANG, the video generation worked really good and that is on a Apache server machine.

So now on all my Ubuntu based versions I do this and the video gen is OK....plus if it is a newer Hiawatha server it starts right up.Just removing the -r 25 from FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS will fix it also in some cases with PATH_FFMPEG = /usr/bin/avconv.