Netcams and time lapse

Eklectick · Post by **Eklectick** » Thu Dec 30, 2004 6:55 pm

Hi

I am trying to configure ZoneMinder to capture images from an Axis netcam in a time lapse way. In this case I am not intrested on analyzing, nor keeping buffers or any other thing that could "tax" on the CPU other than plain image capture and record.

I have been having a hard time tweaking and playing with Frame Skip and Maximum FPS trying to make someting that I beleive is simple. Or is it? :-S

Making a netcam capture and record 1 Frame Per Second is simple, but...

Making a netcam capture 1 FPS and Frame Skip 10 and Section Length of 60 does not render a one minute 10 second time lapse event

Tweaking 1 FPS with Frame Skip of 4000 and Section Length of 600 renderd an event of only 10 frames separated by 10 seconds each.

What are the best settings in Monitor, for a netcam, to make it capture and record (no buffering or analyzing) only one frame, say, every 5 or 10 or 15 seconds?

Regards

Eklectick · Post by **Eklectick** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 2:27 pm

Hi again!

I finally managed to get the netcams on a time lapse.

On the monitor settings under Monitor tab, Frame Skip 0, Buffer tab Pre and Post events to 1 frame, since no analyzing is to be done, set Image Buffer Size and Warm up Frames to 5. On the Misc tab, set the Maximum FPS to 0.10. I guess that playing with this last setting (0.01 to 0.10 or other) could render on a different time lapse frame rate which I am yet to try.

I got 20 Axis 2100 cameras recording 1 frame every 10 seconds on 10 minute events at 640x480 with 90% quality on a 200GB HD estimating about 20 to 25 days of recordings on a P3 500 Mhz with 512 of Ram. Load is so "low" (0.22) that perhaps even 256 of Ram could do the job just fine and... even capable perhaps of handling the load of additional cameras

On the other hand, viewing events delivers them "real time" this being that jpegs stream at one frame every 10 seconds. In order to see them one after the other, the Rate has to be set at 10x. "Live view" of the camera delivers each jpeg at 1 frame every 10 seconds. Perhaps a future release could have a time lapse configuration that takes care of defaulting faster Rate playback and opening a separate faster frame grabbing on live view only. Nevertheless... kudos! Phil.

Hope this helps netcamers.

Regards!

Post by **zoneminder** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:42 pm

Hi,

The ZM_WEB_x_DEFAULT_RATE settings in the bandwidth tabs of the Options window _should_ let you do just that. I haven't treid them for a while so it's possible they may be broken.

Phil

Eklectick · Post by **Eklectick** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 2:48 pm

Hi Phil!

You are absolutely right... and it is not broken

Another thing that I was breaking my head with was to be able to capture at 640x480 and yet view events without having to select 10x Rate and 1/2 Scale over a limited bandwith every time. The settings to default it are there and working! You got ZM so tweakable it amazes me every time I get a chance to work with it.

Regards!