ZoneMinder Forums

I have recently put together a machine to run ZoneMinder as part of a video surveillance system. I currently have 8 cameras running and plan on getting another 8 as soon as iTuner support and myself can get the second card functioning in conjunction with the first. I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the set up of ZoneMinder was, how easy it is to use through the web interface, and how light on system resources it is even when recording from 8 cameras. I do have a few questions though. (I'm still working through the README and setting things up as I go, but have skimmed the rest of it and don't see anything regarding the questions I have. I've also run through the FAQ here for these quirks.)

First of all, I'm running ZoneMinder 1.19.5 on Slackware 10. I'm using Mozilla as a web browser client, so I don't need any plug-ins to view the output. I have a Spectra-8 video capture card with 8 cameras connected; capturing is taking place around 5 fps. The system is an AMD Barton 2500 with a gig of RAM, an 80 gig boot drive, and two 250 gig drives for data in a RAID-1 array. I have another 250 gig drive on the way to add to this RAID.



The first problem I'm having is viewing cameras. I click on a camera name and it pops up the monitoring window as it should and all is well. However, if I close the window and open it up again, I get the broken image icon instead of the streaming images. If I choose another zoom, it comes up and displays as it should. If I switch back to the original zoom, the broken image icon again is displayed. If the window is closed and opened again, I have to choose a zoom that I haven't before to get the video to show up. (For example, the actual resolution is chosen automatically the first time the window is displayed. If I close it and open it again, I choose 3/4 size to get an image because actual has the broken image icon displayed. If I close it and open it again, I do not get an image when either the actual resolution or 3/4 zoom is chosen.) If I switch to stills, it works fine at any zoom factor, but of course the refresh rates aren't anything like watching live video.

Somewhat related to the first problem is this one, which may or may not be related. I have the streaming method in the video options set to jpeg - mpeg displays nothing but white space where the video should be. I have the plugger plug-in to view mpegs through the broswer, but still get nothing.

Another issue that may or may not be related to the first one is a problem with the Montage link. When I click on it, I get a grid of 8 cameras, but only one to three of them actually display an image. Usually one or two images are displayed, but I have had one time that I got three images. The cameras that have images displayed are not the same if you close and re-open the montage.

I also have a question regarding the space requirements for the captured frames. If I look in the events directory, I see that the jpeg stills of each frame are saved. Is there any way to make these be saved as an mpeg? As stated above, I currently have half a terrabyte of storage devoted to video, soon to be three-quarters. Even with this amount of storage space, by my calculations 16 cameras would consume all available space in approximately 9 days, 8 hours. I would very much like to have at least two weeks of video stored before it is erased and the space recycled for new video, but would rather not add another IDE controller and more drives if I can possibly help it.

The only other problem I'm having is that the cameras are only capturing at 5 fps. It doesn't matter if I have a limit in the monitor settings or not. The Spectra-8 is a 4-tuner card capable of 120 aggregate frames per second With 8 cameras, I should be achieving around 15 fps for each camera. The CPU is over 60% idle most of the time, so I know it isn't a problem there. This isn't a huge deal (and I know that unless I can get it to generate mpegs instead of saving the jpeg stills, the space requirements will greatly increase), but was wondering if anybody knows of a reason why this would occur.

I also have the problem with MJPEG being broken in mozilla|firefox|galeon. The only way I have come across to fix this is the java plugin, but it's slow to start when you are viewing lots of events (motion detected events). You can do a forced reload by right clicking -> this frame -> force reload, but that's a pain to do.

I've seen posts were people have said to use nph-zms but I get errors and no video using that...


As for the montage view, do a about:config and search for connect and double (or triple) the 3 settings. That should fix the montage problem.

I have never used the Spectra Cards, but in theory the have devoted chipsets to each input so you should be pushing 30fps.

I know this didn't fix all your problems, but I hope it helped one

Anyone know of a way to fix these wierd MJPEG problems with the broken images...besides the java plugin?

I already have the Java plugin for Mozilla and have tried it on both windoze and linux clients with the same results. I've tried different versions of Mozilla as well, from 1.3 to 1.7. I wouldn't think that the browser would matter (except for IE of course - M$ does things their own way ).

I did the about:config and looked through there. (Very cool - I never even knew that existed!) I got 11 different settings when I searched for 'connect'. I upped several of them, but it did not help with the montage view. I get stills for all the cameras when connecting with IE, but no video.

What exactly is nph-zms?

Thanks for the input and suggestions curtishall.

Try a search for mozilla

Sweat link securiteaze! I had upped the settings referenced as curtisshall suggested, but not to 200. Once I did that, the problems went away with viewing the montage.

I also discovered a simple fix for the broken image problem when viewing a camera multiple times. Go into Edit->Preferences, then Advanced and choose Cache. You'll see a box asking when to compare the cached version of the page to that on the network. By default, 'When the page is out of date' is checked. Change this to 'Every time I view the page' and voila - no more broken image icons.

Is there any way to change the size of the images in the montage view from actual size to one of the zoom factors so that the display from all the cameras can fit on the screen at the same time? (I currently have 8 cameras working, soon to be 16. Even with 8, you have to grab and move the window around to see all of them.)

You can fix the montage images to a set size in the options. It's not quite a zoom setting as larger windows will be shrunk more but it should allow you to get them all in one page.

Phil,

Thanks for the tip Phil. Like I said, I'm still working my way through the readme; sorry for asking something that's most likely in there.

I tried what you said and was able to get the images to shrink down, but there is a problem. The images themselves are smaller, but there is whitespace added between the images so that no room is saved; instead of the monitor being at full size and the space taken up with the image, the same amount of space is taken up only with whitespace instead of an image. Any ideas?

Nevermind, I just loaded up the montage again and it removed the whitespace from between the images. Must've had something in cache or the change hadn't propagated through the system yet when I tried it before.