ZoneMinder Forums

Hello.

First of all, let me thank you Phillip for the fine piece of work you did. Similar packages are being sold for hundreds of dollars, and it's really nice to find such gem in the Open-Source area.

After the smooth installation using LiveCD (another thanks to you, Ross!) the system was able to immediately connect to my DCS-950, and have started to journal any suspicious movement. It was really cool, especially the various zones and changed regions highlighting.

But, to the point. I recently decided to purchase a new D-Link camera, probably DCS-950, as it comes with audio and low-light sensitive sensor, but perhaps the most important feature, is that the video is being streamed as a simple profile MPEG4 directly from the camera, rather then as a multi-part JPEG stream. This allows the camera to utilize the limited bandwidth much better in terms of higher FPS, although with a cost of a small buffering.

The question is, will ZM ever support such type of transmission?

I guess the best way is to decode the streamed video with FFMPEG (if it supports it, of course) to frames, and then to analyze each frame. The received MPEG4 video should not be disposed, but rather streamed to the user and saved on the drive, saving disk space and encoding costs.

Any thoughts on this one? It seems BTW, that all of the newest cameras, from the commodity providers as D-Link, Trendware, etc. are using this type of streaming, and it's unclear whether they still support the old multi-part protocol, as it not listed in the tech specs.

Hello.

I would like to submit a little update on the status of interfacing the ZM to a network camera, streaming MPEG. So far, I managed to discover that almost all of DLINK cameras use the following CGI to stream the video: /cgi-bin/video.vam. As it seems, the streamed video is encoded in a sort of modified H263 codec. Sort of, as the stream cannot be understand by any other player, windows or Linux based, and even the FFPLAY, which uses the FFMPEG, says that it's a unknown format. Only the custom shipped ActiveX can read the format.

The stream starts with the following line: Got vam OK . Afterwards, it starts a binary data, which contains the frames.

A search in the internet has not revealed any similar format or decoder. I will try to address the FFMPEG development group with this issue. If someone has seen something similar, or knows some related info, please drop a line here.

I second request for MPEG4 support. Once we knew that ZM supported it, we could spend more time figuring out how to unravel the stream. Thanks for your efforts so far.

...why not skip mpe4 and go straight for h.264? It's bitrate is 40% less than mpeg4 at the same resolution and framerate.

There are plenty of h.264 capture cards and video servers on their way over from China already