ZoneMinder Forums

Hello, newbie here. I managed to set up ZM with a Hikvision IP camera on an Ubuntu virtual machine (hosted on a Win server). Streaming works, no major errors are thrown in the logs, and yet I don't get anything captured. I am certain that I am doing some trivial error, but I don't know what. Might you be able to help?

Update. I seem to have solved the issue (perhaps) by reducing the alarm frame blending to 3.125% and the Min/Max Alarmed area to 5%. Let's hope for the best...

The min/max area you had at 10% was probably too high.
See: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Dummies_Guide#Example_Zone (note that this example is for a low res stream).

Also, you are modecting on a high resolution image. You may want to consider the following:
https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Dummies_Gui ... Zoneminder

Thank you! But now I am getting too many false-positives. I am playing around with adding many different zones in order to find out where the positives come from. Maybe it's good to set a max limit to the percentage of alarmed pixels, so that sudden changes to the whole pic (e.g. the camera switching on IR lights at night) won't trigger.

Right, you are learning first hand the difficulty of tuning zones, and I don't have an easy answer for you. Some false alarms can be avoided by raising the min alarmed area (for me pixels is easier to tune than percent), but it's a rabbit hole. I find ZMES and email alerts works well at the expense of more CPU (so I only use it on certain monitors).

There's been a bit written about tuning zones on the forums, so search and that may help.