ZoneMinder Forums

This might be the wrong forum and/or the wrong product all together for my application. Please forgive me if it is. Anyways...I want to provide live video feed of my nightclub....but will want to have at least 4 cams to provide full coverage of the dance floor. Will ZM take the feeds from he 4 cams and create one single video? I then will take the mpeg/avi and stream it out via shoutcast. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Currently ZM does not combine feeds from several cameras into one stream, though this is something I plan in the future. The only other alternative would be to feed the video through a video combination box first so you only got one feed into ZM itself.

Phil

I'm new to the whole networked video camera stuff....can ip based cams be run through a mux?

not a traditional one no. a mux could split the screen then the output from the mux could be connected to an ip server ( or modify the camera)

jameswilson: so what are ya thinking I might need? Thanks for all yous guys help btw

I'd just buy a color quad-splitter, and feed *that* into the capture card.

i agree any cheapy quad splitter will do just make sure u get a pal one or a ntsc depending on camera type

right..I knew that...but how does it work if it's an ip cam?

You'd use regular video cameras, quad split them, then feed them into a capture card to webcast.

If you already *have* the webcams, then your problem is different, and I'm not sure you coulc press Zoneminder into that service anyway, since what you need is a *real* signal with all four cameras in it, and Zoneminder only produces a *web page that looks like that*.

well crap...I will be getting ip cams from a friend and I only have 1 camcorder so that's not gonna do me no good. So bottom line yous guys don't think that this will work with ZM....any other suggestions?

If a frame or two a second is good enough, you can use wget to retrieve a frame from each camera, and the netpbm tools or ImageMagick to stich them together. You'll then have a sequence of frames you can stream out along with the music.

what's the deal with mjpgs any ways....do they have sound built in like a mpeg/avi or does that have to be merged later. I was thinking that each cam have focus for 30-45 secs and the go to the next cam and rotate the order

i thought they were motion jpegs.

I'm not sure motion-JPEG isn't a misnomer in our environment, anyway. It's a very specific thing; a codec format used by, for example, the Miro DC cards (-10 and -30, at least), and what, for example, the Panasonic BL-c series cameras send is really just a bunch of normal JPEG's in sequence.

So, if the Original Poster is a coder, he might be able to write a customized zms that coalesces the inputs from four zmc's, and stream the output to whatever...