ZoneMinder Forums

Any possiblity of supporting Ogg Theora and camera side video compression? Seems to me that'd be a great way to get more cameras and more video with a much smaller central system. Specifically, I'm looking at the Elphel Model 313. Its code is all GPLed. There are a couple of interesting articles.

Seems to me that even if you didn't decode the video stream, maybe you could use an occasional jpg or something to:

• check for events
• timestamp the video stream, maybe by just saving an occasional jpg frame with timestamps overlayed
• save only the "interesting" parts of the video stream

.

The Elphel also seems a little less expensive in total dollars than other camers, although I might have that wong. Certainly it's less expensive per bit captured.

Hi.

Can be a good idea - as it's an open source, we can quite naturally to interface ZM and these cameras.

They also have a 333 camera, which supports a Theora Ogg streaming, which should have quite an excellent quality.

I thought it was a matter of frame rate, that all the models past a certain point stream video but some have a higher frame rate and resolution than others.

Interesting, I've never heard of Theora before. I'll try and find out a bit more.

Phil

AFIK, which isn't much, ogg is a "container" format for streaming media. Ogg Vorbis is for audio and Ogg Theora is for video.

It occurs to me that since the camera is zoup-ed up with a FPGA to do the video compression, and runs Linux anyway, it'd be clever to run zoneminder (or the portion thereof that decides when something interesting has happened) on the camera itself. That would significantly cut down on the data transmitted over the nework and allow the camera hardware to do the work it was built to do.

phil this ogg would it solve your streaming audio issue for an upcoming version??
And on topic this camera how would you plug keybaord etc into it or can you just telnet everyting. I have heard about media players that run lunix (ppc) modified to do more but zm needs a bit of power

And on topic this camera how would you plug keybaord etc into it or can you just telnet everyting. I have heard about media players that run lunix (ppc) modified to do more but zm needs a bit of power

You would connect to the camera over the network. If you had to there's an add-in RS-232 serial port, but the network's the way to go.

The camera hardware and software is completely open, IIRC with the exception of the FPGA compiler which is free-as-in-beer, so you're able to do whatever's necessary. If you need a little extra oomph you program the FPGA to do it for you. As Theora's all about video compression, which is all about detecting and encoding differences between successive video frames, there's a natural overlap in the existing FPGA programming and what zoneminder does to look for changes in a scene -- maybe. Maybe you could use some of the existing FPGA to do the change detection, or maybe there's a little extra unused circuitry available for programming the necessary routines. If you put just a little bit of software into the hardware you get a serious speedup. Now that I've made it sound easy you should know that I don't know what I'm talking about -- I only know enough theory to be dangerous. The proof is in the code and I've looked at none of it.

lol i donr even know enough to be dngerous good comment though. Well baest of luck

FYI, the other people who I know that are doing FPGA programming are the folks doing software radio, GNU/Radio.