ZoneMinder Forums

I've recently setup a ZM 1.29, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS headless server, followed the 'easy way' instructions. All good stuff.

I'm on a budget (for our Church) and the Wansview K1 (1080p) and K2 (720p) IP cameras looked pretty cheap. Big thanks to marc.merlins.org reviews of a range of Wansview cameras which encouraged me to purchase them. You can get them newish for £40-50, or less sometimes on ebay.

It wasn't straightforward initially but that's maybe the fact I'm a noob to ZM. I was expecting them to connect using ffmpeg right? But I never seemed to get the right RTP options when that was selected. What works for me (for both the K1 and the K2) is:

General tab
Source type: Remote

Source tab
Remote protocol: RTSP
Remote method: RTP/RTSP
Remote host name: user:password@IP
Remote host port: [change from default for security]
Remote host path: /live/ch0

I currently have 2 K1's, 1 K2 and one D Link DCS 930L attached (640x480). I've reduced the K1's to 720p. All cameras are running 3 fps and I've throttled the bandwidth on the Wansview's to 256kbps. I've reduced the single zone trigger area to less than 50% of the image when possible.

Load is less than 0.5 when all quiet and up to about 1.5 when two cameras have motion. Is that OK? Not sure. Plan on adding more K1s using their wired connection to save my wifi bandwidth (worth doing right?) and if the load issues aren't a problem would like to put them back to 1080p. The K2 is wifi only, but it's great feature is it's very wide field of view. Picture quality on both (even when the K1s are reduced to 720p) is superb IMHO. IR is OK for a cheap camera as well.

As I've researched I've seen a few people running ZM down, but my experience of it has been it great: excellent features and rock solid. The android app works well also. So THANKS to all those who work hard to make such projects happen.

Will maybe come back here with news on how it works with more cameras.

Thanks much for the positive report; we always like to hear those.

A 5 minute load average below 1 *per CPU core* is widely considered best. My experience of current Linuces is that you can get away with 2 per core pretty decently; at 3 per core you should start to worry.

I have a Dell SC1430 that's a quad-core Opteron with 6GB RAM, and it regularly idles around 9, and goes up over 20 when I'm running Montage Review Live... and it seems to run fine. I'm sure it's not perfect, but for the simulated perp follows I've done the results were usable -- this is with 12 720p IP cams at 6fps in ffmpeg/rtsp/modect. (Those are total LA's, not per core

I have two WansView W2s that were nothing but trouble on WiFi. They would lock up randomly and require power cycling. One might run for weeks without trouble, then fail almost daily for another week. The other failed every now and then and once went almost two months without a problem.

I had no video problems with either one when they were actually up and running. When they locked up, their WiFi signal disappeared completely in all but one case.

Since I disabled their WiFi and ran Ethernet to them, they haven't locked up at all. Still, I would not buy again.

I presently have two Wansview W3 720p cams, working with ZM v. 1.30.4 working over WiFi.

Wansview W3 720p IP Camera:
Source Type: remote
Remote Proto: RTSP
Remote Method: RTP/RTSP/HTTP
Remote Host Name: <user>:<password>@<IP address>
Remote Host Path: /live/ch0
Target Colospave: 24-bit color
Capture width: 1280
Capture Height: 720

As posted in the 1.29 section, I had some issues with the ZM server being stuck in a "CLOSE_WAIT" state, but upgrading to 1.30.4 seems to be working fine with these webcams. Haven't attempted hard-wiring, but operating over WiFi is working fine.