ZoneMinder Forums

I am running Zoneminder on an old laptop and I was wanting to use the integrated Camera to point at the door then run some USB cameras in a couple other directions. Zoneminder seems to run normally (I think). When I add or edit the Camera it will operate normally with good picture quality and color for a few seconds then switch to being almost pitch black; I was able to see an outline of something when I turned on a certain light so the Camera is working but its not working well.

Any ideas what I should do to fix this? I selected every color palette on PAL and tried every device format on yuyv. I think it is picking the wrong light setting for the Camera.
Also. Any cheap USB cameras that would be good to point outside and watch for cars from the 1 possible entry path?

You mention USB camera, but to be clear - you can use a webcam.

You can try adjusting the settings, and deep dive into how it works, if you like. There should be some resources on how the webcam is controlled via tv4linux or the module the camera uses. Or you can go to the wikI: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Hardware_Compatibility_List and review the webcams there for details on configuration of functional cameras. One of those might work out of the box.

On v4l cameras (webcams) there is an auto-whitebalance feature that may or may not work very well. ZM can control the white balance.... but I don't anyone has tested that in a while.

point is, I have found that it can make the video stream go dark, then too white, then too dark in an oscillation.

Maybe something like that is happening, maybe not. you will have to turn on debug logs and see what you get.

You are about to jump down the rabbit hole.