ZoneMinder Forums

Hi
I'm looking into using ZM for capturing images of a building project over a long period (9months) and capturing images at a rate of one per 5 or 10 minutes. Also I would like to save them into a single folder or perhaps a monthly folder?

I know this seems a strange way to use ZM but is there any suggestions of settings I could make to do this, please. I have been through the control panels and as much of these forums as possilbe.

- I really don't want to use webcam32.

Thanks
Dave

look at post
neat trick: one source to two monitors from seanadams

basically what he suggests is to set the framerate of the camera in record mode to something like 0.01 (under Tab Misc by Monitor Source).
Not sure if it will accept something like 0.00001 to achieve 5 minute intervals

I have experimented with using the linux cron deamon to switch between camera stati
(zmpkg.pl (predifined status)) but i wonder wether switching every 10 minutes will cause ZM to crash

Hi Dave,

In theory you should be able to do this by setting an appropriately low maximum frame rate and an appropriately high section length in record mode. However in practical terms I'm not sure if the precision in the database is sufficient for this degree of time lapse.

I suspect if you changed the MaxFPS column in the Monitors table from decimal(5,2) to perhaps decimal(8,5) you might find it works. I'll probably try and change this for the next release anyway if I get chance to test it.

Phil,

Another way of getting occasional images recorded is to set the Frame Skip in combination with a slow frame rate and Record mode. That'll give a relatively regular interval...

Thanks I'll try a few things, although I'm not entirely sure how skip works, I have tried .01 and found it to be the slowest before the camera stops working. I have upped the skip to 1000 and it saved once every 10 seconds.

Dave

You might just want to write a quick shell script

in the case of an axis network camera
just wget http://ip/axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi
then get a date/time string and append that to the file name

then just cron that script ever five minutes.

I am doing that for some thing like what you want to do.