ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I'm currently using both great video surveillance apps (Zoneminder and Motion - motion.sf.net).

IMHO they are both great, but with some advantages that could be merged together.

I think that motion-detection is more efficient (in terms of CPU usage and false alarms on outdoor cams), although Zoneminder is really much more user friendly with really nice and intuitive Web interface.

Since motion can enter events into mysql base I wonder if there is any chance of combination of Motion entering events in mysql base (in same manner as Zoneminder detection processes does) and from then using Zoneminder web interface.

I have 3 questions:
- how tight does motion detection process under Zoneminder communicate with other processes (is it only through mysql database or are there any other signaling connections?)
- If I have events in database, can Web interface in Zoneminder be used as general web frontend (without some special features dealing with Zoneminder processes directly ) ?

Thanks in advance,

Robert.


Ideal solution would be to merge those two apps with runtime selection possibility but I guess this is not easily achieved.

Hi Robert,

I don't really know too much about motion but in theory anything can create an event provided they follow a certain convention. The Events tables in the database is pretty self explanatory and various fields can be ignored if necessary. ZM also uses the Frames table which contains details of individual frames, these frames are normally stored under the 'events' directory. The easiest thing is to generate a ZM event and see what is created and then duplicate that.

There isn't much other coupling for viewing historical events as it's pretty much all in the DB, however the live views are tightly coupled via shared memory as a database is way too slow for that.

I do have a long term goal of decoupling the motion detection algorithm to allow other algorithms or approaches to be plugged in but that's a little way off yet.

Did you forget your third question?

Phil,

zoneminder wrote:Hi Robert,

I don't really know too much about motion but in theory anything can create an event provided they follow a certain convention. The Events tables in the database is pretty self explanatory and various fields can be ignored if necessary. ZM also uses the Frames table which contains details of individual frames, these frames are normally stored under the 'events' directory. The easiest thing is to generate a ZM event and see what is created and then duplicate that.

There isn't much other coupling for viewing historical events as it's pretty much all in the DB, however the live views are tightly coupled via shared memory as a database is way too slow for that.

I do have a long term goal of decoupling the motion detection algorithm to allow other algorithms or approaches to be plugged in but that's a little way off yet.

Did you forget your third question?

Phil,

Yes,

but I will be able to ask now. I've setup motion to generate only short movies out of events. Could zoneminder "understand" events with only recorded movie, or there must be jpegs (I guess that mybe Zoneminder is saving jpegs ony - movies are generated on fly ? ) ?

Regards,

Robert.

ZM will 'partially' understand events without JPEGs, though I intend to improve this area. However it might struggle a bit if the image frame metadata is not in the Frames table. You might get away with inserting just one or two frames (perhaps representing the start and end of the event) in there though.

All I can suggest is that you give it a try and see what happens!

Phil,