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neat trick: one source to two monitors

Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 3:00 am
by seanadams
I didn't expect this to work, but I tried it and it seems to work fine!

Some of my cameras are pointed out into the street. I have their zones set up to only trigger alarms when activity happens on my driveway / front yard. I'm not interested in cars driving by or what the neighbors are doing...

However, I wanted the ability, only if needed, to go back and review which cars were parked in the street throughout the day. I figured the best way to do this would be to have a time-lapse video of the entire day.

So I just set up another monitor using the same /dev/videoX source, set the frame rate to 0.1, and now I have both a time lapse video and an event log for the same camera. Sweet!

This will motivate me to put some plants in my back yard so I can watch them grow. :)

Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 3:54 am
by rdmelin
Great idea.

Now, OT, what about your Squeezebox?

Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 4:17 am
by seanadams
I thought you'd never ask! :)

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Squeezebox is my company's product - plays music over the network. If you have a music collection on your computer, and especially if you're into home wiring/networking/automation, then you need one. It's open source, with a community of enthusiasts much like Zoneminder. Readily available in the UK too, BTW. See it here:

http://www.slimdevices.com
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Many of our customers are into home automation, and some have written extensions/plugins to Squeezebox for controlling lights, reading sensors, and such. But nobody has done anything with Squeezebox+Zoneminder yet... so in addition to diggin Zoneminder by itself, I'm also trying to figure out if perhaps there are some fun projects I could do with hooking them together them in some useful way...

Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 6:00 am
by marmoset
Nice trick, now my wife wants some time lapse things as well!

I've got a slimp3 and a squeezebox, great stuff. Neat to see you over here as well.

Moses

Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 5:55 am
by unix-guy
Hey - great tip! I set up a monitor to record at .2 FPS and I'm liking the idea of a time-lapse continuous recording.

I have noticed that for whatever reason, I can't play the events back as a stream! I have to "generate video" to watch them, which is a drag.

I've tried setting the size from default 600 frames to 100, tried playing back faster/slower, but no dice. I get a black screen for a few seconds, and then it goes away...

Any ideas?

Kevin

Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 10:55 pm
by seanadams
I noticed that too. Probably some glitch to do with the non-integral frame rate.

Anyway I was about to post a script I made a couple days ago to gather all the events and roll them into one giant time-lapse MPEG... but now I can't find it! I left it in the html/events directory.... does zoneminder clear foreign stuff out of this directory?

Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 11:23 pm
by unix-guy
Ok, glad its not just me :)

I happened to be looking at the zmaudit.pl script yesterday, and yes, I believe it does remove stuff from the events directory that don't map to DB entries.

Kevin

Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 12:22 am
by Berg
Hi Sean,

When I saw the name, I thought to myself ... self ... how likely is it that it is the Sean Adams ;)

Glad to see you play with ZoneMinder - if your contribution to the ZoneMinder community is 1% of your contribution to the Slim community (you do after all have a different interest in Slim), your presence here will be great.

(PS) I am a Slim and Squeeze owner and could not be happier ! It is a great product - now if I could only get around to buying the new Squeeze with it awesome display !!!

Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2004 6:47 pm
by unix-guy
Sean,

I found that using the JPEG streaming mode (under Video on Config screen) works to view the time-lapse recordings...

Kevin

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 1:43 pm
by george_s
Sean, did you ever find that script to combine time lapse mpegs into a single large mpeg? Thanks for the time lapse suggestion, I've been wanting to do that. It'd really be handy to combine them together. Thanks. George

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>Anyway I was about to post a script I made a couple days ago to gather all the events and roll them into one giant time-lapse MPEG... but now I can't find it! I left it in the html/events directory....

Posted: Sun Sep 26, 2004 5:26 am
by seanadams
george_s wrote:Sean, did you ever find that script to combine time lapse mpegs into a single large mpeg? Thanks for the time lapse suggestion, I've been wanting to do that. It'd really be handy to combine them together. Thanks. George
Sorry - it got wiped out. I'll rewrite it when I have some time...