ZoneMinder Forums

Hi everybody...

has been a long time since my last post... im sorry for that !

People, i have two questions...

first, my montage with mpeg system was a total disaster... it simply didnt work as it should, each camera were by default delayed 3 seconds. until this point, no problem.... but after some time
(five minutes or less) the "sync" of the cameras simply breaks down !.. one camera have the default 3 seconds of delay, one other have 8 seconds, another 10 seconds... the system simply gets DUMB and everything ive tried to make the "sync" still working just failed... i know this is not impossible, all standard comercial dvrs do that !. I want to try a little more, (see that the montage itself is not a problem... but the growing delay sync issue is). I intend to make a LOCAL version of zoneminder that also has the actual web version for remote viewing.

I know another user in another forum section have started a message about this, but as i can see he didnt started the project.

Well, another thing is the MPEG4 direct record... Sure this is NOT a extremely necessary feature...but this would be very good.... as i can see it dont really need to capture and record directly in mpeg4, it can capture in jpeg (as it actually does) and after the event is considered "finished" it launches a script to make a mpeg4 of that event.... THE ONLY problem is that the web interface doesnt have the structure to deal with mpeg4 files... statistics, "per frame" view mode and others wouldnt be available. but on other hand you could have a higher FPS system per camera and at a better quality with the same or eve less disk space...

As i can see this is simple to make, i just dont know where to start... i would like any sugestion of you all about this...

Oh. Another project i've already started is a Graphical CDburner for Zoneminder... It actually is beta and need some more development, but i think within two weeks i will have something stable... for instance ive created a script that searches the databases for "archived" Events, and creates a link to each one in directory /cdrec. Then i map webcdwriter to the directory /cdrec. i run webcdwriter from a link (shortcut) in my graphical desktop... the shortcut runs the "identifier" script before webcdwriter, this ensure webcdwriter will aways have a direct way to get the "archived" events, this turns webcdwriter in a much more simple cd-writting component for zoneminder. This is ready and works well, i will post it in a day or two in User Contributions section.

Well, Philip, i want to know about what do you think of all this... do you think a mpeg4 "automatic conversion" version of zoneminder would be useful ? and theother users in this forum... i think it would be a fast way to add a GOOD feature to zm... and the web interface could have an option ZM_AUTO_MAKE_MPEG_FROM_EVENTS that disable features like the per frame view or statistic and let you use mpeg 4. much easier than writing a complex way to record direct in mpeg4.

And about the mpeg montage... do you know what does it could be ? ive tested in asf and wmv protocols and same thing occurred. this is easy to reproduce... select MPEG mode for viewing, open two windows one for each camera and wait something about 15 minutes... you will issue that.

I would like to use the h263 protocol (as ive said in old post) because making tests with it, it is a very good protocol for video transmission, very fast even on low bandwidth links. it simply doesnt show the video. If someone have tried another format and had success, please tell me.

Really thank you all for liste to me.

Victor Diago

FWIW, I have most of a script written that extracts yesterdays events, converts them to MPEG (of your choice; anything ffmpeg will encode), and burns them on a CD-R, with appropriate names.

I ran out of time on a short Friday to get ffmpeg working, but I'm pretty happy with the scripting around it; I should have it up here on Monday, late.

i have had the montage streaming issue too. would it be possible to combine the streams locally then encode a single stream ie 4 cams then make a four way split and make a single video feed. this would then send a single stream to the browser and not 4 seperate streams. i assumme this would also use less bandwidth. can we do this. sorry if post is a little confusing am using my smartphone . james

This is a little differant James and is not the same as montage in the web but looking for a way to make an application simular that does not use as much resoarces that runs only on the zm server.

oh sorry i can see what your trying to achieve i assume its like a zm desktop with direct images straigt from source rather than off apache. all i was meaning was about the atreaming out of sync and wondered if an easier work around was as i said. i hope your work on this goes well though. out of interest what language is all this written in?

I think there are a few differant people coming at this each their own way. ZM its self uses c, c++, perl, bash, and php (their maybe more) Myself, if I was to try to develop such an app. I would try to make it run under X and pull the images directly from the buffers. I don't have this type of experiance and for all I know this could be just as big of a performance hit as running the web app. I can only hope that either I can reach this level of comprehension or someone that already has this knowledge becomes involved. Currently I'm working on my PHP and MySQL skills, as I myself only got envolved in both ZM and linux just over a year ago and still learning lots daily (including studing the roots of UNIX and Linux). Prior to ZM I was a Windoze person that wished in one hand for something and took some c++ years back as part of my Electronics Egineering degree (Which I'll be breaking those books out of the shelf soon.
Now I have one laptop left that will eventualy go linux and working on my third linux server and don't wish anymore but decide what I want and go to making it happen
Also I appologize if you took afence to my post, I didn't mean for you to and was only tring to point out that this thread was of a different topic (I tend to be lazy sometimes when posting and be direct)

no offence taken cordel at all. Im a bit of a wondows man myself and develop the database for work in ms Access so i have limited vb skills. I was thinking about learning another language and maybe then (just maybe mind) i could add something to this project. Im still learning linux too, but i think a pure zm front end (no kde etc) would be a great shell. I assume that most of the zm boxes only do zm, I know that mine will.

Regards
James

Replying to Victors original post,

1) I think an option to auto-create videos is a good idea. So far I've just assumed that people can just create a filter and run zmvideo.pl to do this but I think it needs to be a bit more user friendly.

2) Regarding the buffering issue, have to you checked to make sure that the parameters you are passing to zms do not exceed the capacity of your connection? In other works if you have a 64kps link but the streams are using 35kps each then they will gradually fall behind until you hit a critical buffer limit at the sending end. It's worth checking anyway. On the roadmap is a better video viewer (a bit like Cambozola) that will allow pause, fast forward etc and will also keep in sync with the server. It's still a little way off though

Phil

Hi phil.

Thanks (a lot) for answer... !!!!

1 -> yes, it would be cool not to only make it more userfriendly, but to integrate it with Zoneminder.... once you make a mpeg video of the event, the mpeg file is not recognized itself by zoneminder... it would be cool to at least access it over the web interface. The interface should check if it is a jpeg event or a mpeg one. if its a mpeg, it should disable the per images view mode , etc etc.

2-> i was on the same machine as zm was running... so there is no bandwidth related... ( i would be very happy if it was that, but its not !!!)

Thanks again

Victor Diago