ZoneMinder Forums

I am having extream difficulty in getting a reliable output from the system. I have set up a single camera in monitor mode. THe processes are all running now with no aparent errors in the logs or syslog. If I click on the monitor name I get a watch window up, which the forst time I use it after installing works fine with the live stream at about the same rate I would get directly from the camera. If I close this window and re open it I do not get the image any more. If I change the scale of the image to 1/2 say, it starts working at that scale. If I change it back to actual, I still get no picture. If I now change it back to 1/2 again that now no longer works. If I want to get the image working again, I have to delete the monitor and start again, when the same situation repeats. What is causing this behaviour? I have almost spent 2 days trying to get this system working. I have seen loads of people singing zoneminders praises so I am a little confised as to why I am having such dificulties.

after further testing, it seems to be a problem with viewing under mozilla. If I close down the browser completely and restart it, I can look at each of the scaled images again 1 more time each.
Konqeror doesn't display any image and the screen doesn't size properly,
IE will change and change back OK, but the stream speed is pitiful at around 1 frame every 5-10 seconds.
Galeon behaves the same as mozilla
Opera behaves like IE with a very slow frame rate (despite claiming 11 fps at the bottom) but it will allow me to view a stream more than once.

I can't think of any other browsers to try

one other thing is I do not get any output in the montage page. When I select it from the main screen it appears as a tiny window in the top of the screen and has no images in it.

Please any help would be greatly appreciated as I am very keen to get this system working.

Hi,

A couple of things to try.

Firstly can you run zmu -m 1 -q -v to get a dump of the monitor settings to save you listing them out manually. You will need to change 1 to whatever your monitor id is and may need to add a username and password if running in authenticated mode. You may want to blot out IPs or anything you don't want revealed.

Secondly, if you are definately getting streaming via zms, have you tried changing the zms path to end in nph-zms instead of straight zms? That helps in some circumstances.

Phil,

I have 2 monitors set up which have the ID 1 and 2

zmu -m 1 -q -v -U admin -P <passwd>
returns imitiatly to the command line with no message. echo $? tells me the return code was 255 if that is any help.

the database is running and if I type an invaid monitor number it returns an error telling me so.

Did you try it without a space between the -U and username and -P and password? I don't know that it matters but it's worth a try.

Also, were you running it as root? I don't think a regular user has enough permissions.

Phil,

I also have experienced this annoying problem of streaming giving a blank window when revisited
at the same scale. Changing the scale works, but only once, until you kill the browser. This appears to me to be some sort of cacheing problem in Mozilla/Netscape/FireFox browsers. Canging to nph-zms had no apparent effect.

zoneminder wrote:Did you try it without a space between the -U and username and -P and password? I don't know that it matters but it's worth a try.

Also, were you running it as root? I don't think a regular user has enough permissions.

Phil,

Tried without the spaces and I get the same results (nothing returned) and yes I was running as root.

I have noticed this issue with the Mozilla browser. To bring the brocken link back I'd refresh the frame. As for the frame rate you discribed mine works great. Is it possible that you have cookies blocked since you connection rate is stored in that cookie? What you have discribed sounds like the default settings for the Low bandwidth setting.

I've seen this kind of trouble before when Viewing ZM's streams under Mozilla. Specially if I'm running the browser on the same machine I'm running ZM.

Now, although Mozilla has native support for MJPG streams, it seems to be temperamental at times. The zms daemons seem to be working just fine, and viewing from Internet Explorer (through cambozola) from a remote machines works perfect.

So, the workaround for me was to force ZM to always use cambozola to view streams. That way, wether Mozilla, Opera or IE, I know just how the ZM stream will behave.

Hope this helps,
Jose Rodriguez