ZoneMinder Forums

Hello.

So I installed ZM the other day so I could us my new IP camera. I've installed ZM on my Ubuntu 14.04 server and used nginx instead of apache (using the example nginx config). everything seem to work fine, I can view the camera fine however, I noticed the log was getting spammed with errors saying 'Error while decoding frame' (screenshot below). I'm using a Sinocam SN-IPC-5033 CSW-WI-UK (Its a 1080p wireless IP camera).


What should I do about this error?

Heres my cameras settings:




Thanks.

Try ffmpeg source type instead.

SteveGilvarry wrote:Try ffmpeg source type instead.

Hey. I have tried ffmpeg but I get the annoying "smudging" issue when using that, which I don't with current settings.

What is frame rate on the camera ?

ccc wrote:What is frame rate on the camera ?

Its 25fps

FFMPEG with remote method RTP/RTSP, which forces TCP instead of UDP. UDP is dropping packets in ffmpeg seems to be the most common cause of smearing. Also dropping FPS will help with performance, 5fps is normally recommended. There is an issue in github where I tried some settings to help with the smearing, but it is an ffmpeg thing with their circular buffer.

There are workarounds to the smudging issue with the ffmpeg source type.
The simplest thing to do is to make sure the Remote Method is set to "RTP/RTSP" which forces the stream to TCP.
You should try that first.

Read about other things to try here: https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/issues/811

If that does not work then your second choice is the libvlc source type.

It is unlikely we are going to get the Remote source type working as well as ffmpeg or libvlc. It it doesn't work, then you should try a different source type. We just don't have the manpower or variety of cameras to spend time maintaining it. Feel free to submit pull requests.

Also note that you are running Ubuntu 14.04, which has native support for libav instead of ffmpeg. Despite claims from the libav developers, we know from experience that it is inferior to ffmpeg. Trying to add ffmpeg to Ubuntu 14.04 is problematic because you either end up with both libav and ffmepg on your system at once (which causes problems) or you try to rip out libav which causes dependency problems with other packages. The short and skinny is that, you will make things easier on yourself if you upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu. All versions newer than 14.04 changed their native support back to ffmpeg (thank God).

Hi

I have a similar issue . After the install of 1.29 on ubuntu 16.04 all as fine and then I noticed new events were not always registering in the camera panel but the live feed was fine . The logs shows the decoding frame error entries (see the sample attached) . I have read a few other posts for advice and dropped the FPS down to 7 . Also RTSP is using TCP which I have confirmed via a packet capture