ZoneMinder Forums

Hey,
I saw a webpage that showed that you could stream the internet camera made by linksys (WVC11B) with mplayer (mplayer http://localhost/img/video.asf)
Is it possible to get read from streaming asf with zoneminder? Or can it only use image grabs? If so, I guess I'll be returning this and getting a dlink DCS-900W.
Thanks

You can user ZoneMinder to get streaming ASF (or any other format supported by ffmpeg) from any kind of camera. The only provisos seem to be that Media Player likes to buffer about 5 seconds worth before displaying so you'll always be that far behind. It also _might_ not work too well on really slow frame rates I guess though I've not tried it myself.

Phil

Whoops. I misread your question. Currently ZoneMinder cannot use asf as an input, though it will be able to eventually. At the moment it uses with individual frame grabs or multi-part JPEG streams from network cameras.

Phil

Hello Phil.

I just stumbled on this article while searching for similar topics. As I mentioned in my thread, I'm working on a similar solution, which will be able to capture any kind of MPEG4 input from the network camera, including the simple and advanced MPEG profiles. I will submit these patches when they will be stable and working, but for now, I'm opened for suggestions.

I plan to have it working in the following manner:

There will be 2 scenarios:

One:

1) MPEG4 captured from the camera.
2) zma or zmf daemons will write it in a raw MPEG4 to a disk, with a hourly intervals, thus allowing to considerably save disk space, and bypass the encoding process (as the camera did already all the encoding), and still have hourly intervals available for inspection.
3) MPEG4 video streamed to the users – again, without any encoding on the server side.

Two:
1) MPEG4 captured from the camera.
2) MPEG4 is dissected to individual frames with ffmpeg. The frames are analyzed, and processed as a usual MJPEG images, including all the analysis features provided by ZM.
3) The frames are saved as a usual JPEG on the disk.
4) The user gets a MPEG4 stream.

The first scenario obviously fits the most the 24x7 recording scenario (MOCORD), as it allows to use the fact that the entire encoding load is falls on the cameras, in a model similar to a distributed computing. The second scenario, while more complicated and system resource intensive, allows to enjoy from a better frame rate, as the MPEG4 video is much more bandwidth effective then MJPEG.

What do you think?

Solution 2 is what I was planning to implement, however solution 1 is good also, provided it doesn't make things too complicated and is configurable enough so that it works with existing setups.

I look forward to your input!

Phil

Hello,
I have searched a way to get the WVC54G up and running and it seems to be possible to get mjpeg from the camera. Posted in another forum
---------------------------------------------
you can get motion Jpeg also
from the URLs

http://<YourWebCam>/img/mjpeg.jpg
http://<YourWebCam>/img/mjpeg.cgi

you can view it from javamain.html

http://<YourWebCam>/img/image.cgi?next_file=javamain.html

if you look at the html source for Image Tab under the Setup section you will see the options for it commented out.
------------------------------------------------
I cant test it, but it is an option.
But keep on going to implement real mpeg4, would be a nice feature !

Bjoern