ZoneMinder Forums

I upgraded a server for a local bowling alley after a hard drive failure, figured it would be a good time to move off of the old Ubuntu 10.04 Server since it would be a re-install anyway. Since the upgrade to the newer server environment and going from ZM 1.26 to 1.29 the live view and recordings on all of the CCTV cameras has been crisp and clear for anything stationary, but anything moving will blur.

I initially suspected an overworked CPU or memory, but the 4-core CPU has been sitting between 8% to 32% utilization, and the 16GB of memory has been utilized between 12% to 40%

Here is a rundown of the hardware, I don't have exact specs on the CCTV cameras as there are 4 different models in use (but the issue is consistent across all of them regardless.)
-Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS
-ZM 1.29
-AMD Athlon II 640 4-Core
-16GB Crucial RAM (2x 8GB)
-HDD(s) = 2x Western Digital RE 250GB Sata III (RAID 1) for OS / 2x Western Digital Red 1TB Sata III (RAID 1) specifically for recordings
-2x Kodicom 8800 8-Camera DVR cards (16 total inputs) 12 in use.

The business had a couple power outages about 6 months prior to the primary drive(s) failure which also led to the discovery of a faulty UPS for the server. Had to replace both 250GB and one of the 1TB drives since they where showing a large amount of bad sectors. The lone surviving drive was extensively tested and showed no errors. Prior to the failure the whole system worked great, clear video on live and recorded playback. I am kind of lost why this is happening and what to explore further. I have tried adjusting the "Blending" from none to 50% with no success, different cameras and cables as well. All settings are consistent between cameras with the obvious exception of the input.

On a side note, I have noticed that if the server needs to be restarted for a security update etc the ZM service has to be restarted half a dozen times to get all the cameras to come up. Currently 7 or 8 will be available after startup, but they are never consistent which ones. Each ZM service restart usually brings up another camera that wasn't previously online.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

That is a known issue with the video for linux, v4l, driver for your capture card. Try searching the forum for others with the same issue. mastertheknife reported the cause of the issue, so searching his name might help. I've seen this reported many times, but I don't remember if anyone ever figured out a way to fix the driver.

The underlying issue is that the driver is no longer maintained in the Linux Kernel. It still exists, but as you can see the lack of maintenance has caused issues. This problem will likely get worse as newer Kernels are released. Capture cards have definitely reach EOL.

Alternatives to trying to find a solution to this driver problem include:
- Roll back to the previous version of Ubuntu and stay at that version
- Buy ip video encoders to convert the analog cameras to ip
- Replace the analog cameras with ip. Even the cheap $40 ip cameras are significantly better than the best analog camera these days.

Thanks for the info, I will take a look and see what I can find. Hopefully I can find a workaround for that. Would love to move them to IP Cams for sure, just have to wait for their but their budget may not allow until later this year.

Well based on the direction you sent me in, I was able to find some more specific areas to explore in the settings. It seems that these capture cards are only happy when interlacing is enabled. Switched all the source settings to "V4L2-INTERLACED" and everything is clear in the video now. I will have to keep an eye on things for awhile to make sure this doen't have an adverse effect somewhere else, but for now I will call this one solved.

Very nice. Keep us updated, and I will refer others to this thread for a documented resolution.

Well it appears after the cameras started feeding more movement to the capture card the previous setting stopped being effective. The setting worked fine with minimal movement, but when the lanes started filling with people then the videos became blurred again. Changed the "Deinterlaced" setting to "Discard" and that has been working well for an hour now. If this changes I will update.