ZoneMinder Forums

Hi All,

I have uploaded a beta of .16 to http://www.zoneminder.com/downloads/zm- ... 027.tar.gz

You are welcome to download it and have a play however I have a couple of caveats.

Firstly I would ensure that you have a full backup of your existing setup, including database, first if it contains anything important. There may be more than one beta of .16 and the tar files will not contain any kind of incremental upgrade from previous beta's, so if the database changes you would have to re-upload from a previous real version.

Secondly I have not had time to update any of the documentation so some of the new bits might be a bit tricky to figure out. Please us this thread (and only this thread) to ask questions or to report problems with this beta. I will post reponses containing information about the new features etc also on this thread so this will be the first place to look for documentation also.

The next post in this thread will contain a brief description of what's new.

Cheers,

Phil,

The .16 beta contains the following changes

1. New modes for monitors. Instead of Passive, Active, and X10, the modes are now Monitor (= old Passive) which just allows you to watch the feed, Modect (= old Active) which is MOtion DetECT and which will capture events as previously, Record which continuously records with no analysis and MoCord which is a hybrid of Modect and Record and which will continuously record but also do motion detection and highlight where this has occured. The Record and Mocord functions both records events whose length in seconds is defined by the 'Section Length' monitor attribute. You can additionally specify a 'Frame Skip' value to tell it to not record 'n' frames at a time, when not alarmed.
2. The X10 mode has been removed and replaced by an indication of whether the monitor is 'continuous' or 'triggered'. This basically just indicates whether it may be controlled outside of zmdc and zmpkg. Additionally the X10 triggers may now be specified in an X10 section. This has changed to allow for other types of triggers to be added more easily.
3. The event listings are paginated by default. You can list all of the events if you like by choosing the appropriate option. There are shortcuts to pages of events at the top of the listing. If these produce strange looking sequences like 1,2, 3, 5, 9, 17, 37 etc this is deliberate and uses an exponential algorithm intended to allow you to quickly navigate through the list to a particular page.
4. Event and monitor streams can now be scaled to a certain extent allowing you to view at a different resolution than that captured. This area may be somewhat incomplete especialy in terms of monitoring at a higher screen size where the frame is not adjusted properly.
5. Event streams can now be viewed at various rates allowing faster review (if your bandwidth allows) to long events, or slower for more precision.
6. Generation of MPEG videos now also allows you to specify the scale relative to the original image and also the frame rate. Again, for long events captured in the perpertual recording modes this will allow a faster review of the period the event covers.
7. Specification and modification of monitors is now in a tabbed form for easier navigation.
8. The stream headers have been changed to hopefully ensure that they are less likely to be cached.
9. A nasty bug
10. zmdc.pl now has an upper limit (15 minutes) to the time it waits before restarting continuously crashing processes.
11. zmfilter.pl now includes Archive::Zip and other modules on an as needed basis so won't complain about them being missing unless they have been explicitly configured to be used.
12. zmwatch now more adaptive to actual frame rates.
13. zmfilter.pl will now restart on failure to read shared memory. Previously this could go into a nasty CPU sucking loop!
14. zmconfig.pl has option to run with no database if necessary
14. Various administrative file changes and reorgs.
15. Various tweaks and mods to reduce compiler and memory warnings.

The .16 beta does NOT contain

1. Most of the suggestions and contributed code that people have offered. I intend to include things like disk space filters and such like in the real .16 version if I can.

Cheers

Phil

All right!!! Great job Phillip!

Let's see... on RH9 with an Axis 2100 network camera.

First I had to add a database field, FrameSkip tinyint(3), to the Monitors table so I could create a mointor.

Then I had shared memory problems because apache created the shared memory segment with permissions 700. Modified zm_monitor.cpp, line 183; changed the permissions from 700 to 770.

Now, all works well, streaming and all. But the zms crashes a few seconds after bringign up the monitor window. There are no hints in the log files... any ideas?

Regards,
Jose Rodriguez

Hi Jose,

Thanks for taking a look so quickly. You were right about the frame skip field, I had forgotten to regenerate the DB schema, actually I think I'd forgotten to add the alter schema to the distribution as well.

I'm curious about the shared memory permissions thing. I have an installation on RH9 and that doesn't need the permissions changing. What is it other than apache and root that would need access and so would require permissions other than 700?

The zms thing is a bit worrying as well. Does it crash both when streaming feeds and events or just one of them? I had a nasty problem a week or so ago when it would fall over for no apparent reason at all. This turned out to be that a large array was declared on the stack. There was no compiler complaint and no obvious problem in gdb. I hope it's not one of those! If you run it on the command line does it crash as well?

Cheers,

Phil,

you will upload a sub-release or use the same release?

Phillip,
Dont worry about the zms crashing... I was using Mozilla 1.5 and it seemed to crash the streamed video often. I checked with Opera and cambozola and all goes fine. It must be a Mozilla 1.5 bug. I'll try with Mozilla 1.4 and let you know.

About the permissions, well I think if you create a file, or shared memory segment, under user apache with permissions set to 700, the only user that can access the file will be apache. A program that runs setuid root will acess it because of the root superuser privileges, but a program that run setguid root wont be able to access it. Furthermore, a program running setguid apache should not be able to access either.

Now, the issue is wether the program runs setguid or setuid...

Another issue I found is that with MS Internet Explorer, the monitor window will not pop up because of supposed javascript errors.

Regards,
Jose Rodriguez

nice work philip i was looking at new features. and i see many upgrades.

o install a release RD7.3 same that i use for 0.15
and test this "Unknown column 'FrameSkip' in 'field list'" and now i cant create cameras.
all the instalation seems to work fine.

Fernando,

It is uploaded under the same name as it's such a major omission. The name will change to reflect the date in future tho, so any tomorrow will be zm-0.9.16-031028.tar.gz etc. Hopefully I won't do more than one per day again. You will need to either recreate the DB or run the upgrade script to get the FrameSkip column (plus other stuff).

Jose,

Do you know what the JS errors are? And which version of IE? Regarding the shared memory, as far as I know nothing runs setgid but I could be wrong. The minor security risk with 770 as a permission is that some setups make everyone members of the web server group. However I doubt that kind of VS setup would also be used for ZM.

Phil,

ok seems to work fine.

many options to investigate . iam lost in some functions. but i will keep testing.
i use rd7.3 with bt878 grabber. like allways

to improve..
put pages in still mode of recorded events..
a 10 minutes recording is 2900 frames at 5 fps.. will be mad to load a 2900 fotogram page.. :)
but who care right now. 0.16 is great..

Hi Fernando,

Good point about paginating the still images, I will add this to the beta in the next day or two.

Phil,

Phillip:
It seems that if you use a name that contains whitespace for a monitor, then IE can't understand it. Note that is doesnt happen on mozilla or opera. Typical MS programming; throw a wrench at it and it just crashes.

It figures.

Regards,
Jose Rodriguez

o i was sure that was an sql error. that not permit blanks...
o so maybe is a IE error.. if you put bad user and/or password create a cookie or session and you have to close ie and trie again.
the idea is .. if you put wrong users dont store in sessions or cookies.

I mean names for monitors, not users.

Actually the source code for the html page had something like "zmWatchMIS TEST". After I changed it it read "zmWatchMIS02" and all was well. So its not a SQL or cookie error.

Regards,
Jose Rodriguez

iam not shure but i create a rule thats delete events
Archive status "iqual to" unarchived AND
Date/time "less or iqual to" -8 hour

there is 24 events thats maches that rule ... they was 60. i delete some by hand.
can anyone trie it. and tellme if have same error.