ZoneMinder 1.21.4 Released

[zoneminder]

I'm pleased to announce that ZoneMinder version 1.21.4 has been released today.

This release includes quite a large number of changes, both bug fixes and usability enhancements. Probably the most notable are the revamp of the video interface, the (beta) introduction of the timeline view, a bit of a rework of the xHTML interface and lots of small enhancements to make ZoneMinder faster and easier to use.

Full details of the changes are described below :-

o FEATURE – The video generation interface has been redesigned and expanded. This allows you to see what videos have been generated previously and manage, view or download them. You can also specify more precisely what input and output options to pass to ffmpeg and what video formats you want to support. These options are available from the Options->Tools view.

o FEATURE – Historical video is now supported from the XHTML mobile device interface allowing you to replay previous events etc.

o FEATURE – A new timeline view has been added. This is an enhanced graphic activity view that represents events as colour coded bars on a time based chart. Passing your mouse over the activity will display images and details from the events in the chart. You are able to choose whether you see this view or the traditional events view as a default. Since this view can be a large file and dynamic loading of event images can be bandwidth intensive this preference can be specific on a bandwidth specific basis. The option to switch between the traditional list and the timeline view is available at all times however. IMPORTANT NOTE: This view is a beta version only and due to extensive use of CSS currently only renders correctly on FireFox type browsers. Even then as it can use huge numbers of elements it is possible it may degrade or crash your browser. Specifically Internet Explorer seems to get totally confused and renders some elements twice and others in the wrong place etc. I hope to remedy this situation for the next release but for now using this view with IE is not recommended.

o FIX – References to the video device files are now expressed as full file paths rather than just numbers. This allows files other than /dev/videoX to be used easily.

o FIX – Integration with all versions of ffmpeg, including CVS, is now supported. At least until the next ffmpeg interface change anyway!

o FEATURE – Monitors can now use a file path as a video source. This allows you to use scripts such as wget or other webcam type applications to generate your images which can then be fed into ZoneMinder as a monitor and analysed and archived etc.

o FEATURE – Users can now be defined with a maximum bandwidth setting. This prevents low privilege users from swamping the system with lots of high bandwidth streaming.

o FEATURE – Debug levels for the binaries can now be controlled in a limited fashion from the Options screen. For more details see the help on the Options->Tools->ZM_EXTRA_DEBUG* options.

o FEATURE – The user authentication methods have been revised to separate authentication at the web front end from authentication at back end streaming. Thus there are now several more authentication options to allow more fine control. The most significant of these ZM_AUTH_TYPE now offers a choice of ‘remote’ authentication which allows you to use a third party authentication scheme such as http basic authentication and have that users name passed via the REMOTE_USER environment variable. Providing there is a user of that name known to ZoneMinder they will be automatically logged in. Be warned however that there is no facility for this user to log out so ensure that you do not lock yourself into a low privilege account. Also you may need to remove user cookies when you change authentication methods.

o FEATURE – Users now have a ‘control’ permission which determines whether they are able to control PTZ style cameras. As with the other permissions there are three levels, None, View and Edit. Unlike some of the other options it may not be obvious what levels do what. The ‘None’ level bars access to any control functionality, the ‘View’ level permits users to actually control the positioning and settings of a camera (rather than just look at them which is what might be expected) and the ‘Edit’ level allows users to modify the various control capabilities.

o FIX – A bug was fixed where the streamed images were using the quality settings for saved files.

o FIX – Jpeg errors are now reported via the generic ZoneMinder error and debug mechanism rather than just to standard output as is the default in libjpeg.

o FIX – The time taken to load and refresh the console view has been reduced. This is especially significant where you may have lots of monitors.

o FIX – Paths to the control scripts were hard coded with a full path. This broke the packaged ZoneMinder distributions so the paths are now relative to the ZM_PATH_BIN config unless they start with a ‘/’.

o FIX – The masks used for shared memory have now been refined to prevent invalid values from causing duplicates.

o FEATURE – Monitors can now be re-ordered from the console view to allow you to choose how you would like them arranged.

o FEATURE – Motion detection can now be temporarily disabled from the watch view. This is most useful with PTZ type cameras where you can switch off motion detection whilst repositioning the camera. Just don’t forget to switch it back on again afterwards!

o FEATURE – A default scale per bandwidth setting can now be defined. This allows you to reduce the size of streams etc on slow connections.

o FEATURE – Monitors can now be defined with a default scale. This allows you to reduce the viewing size of a monitor that might be capturing at a large image size. This works in conjunction with the bandwidth specific scaling so if you bandwidth setting is 50% and your monitor is also 50% then at that bandwidth you will be viewing at 25%. This is to ensure that all monitors maintain relative scaling at all bandwidths.

o FEATURE – The choice of streaming versus stills views as default can now be specified per bandwidth setting.

o FEATURE – In the past there has been some confusion about what the ‘prev’ and ‘next’ options do when scrolling through events. They actually move to the previous or next event in the list from which the event was selected rather than in chronological order. Previously this order was descending date/time in most cases meaning that the previous event would be one that occurred after the current event. In order to prevent this confusion and allow users to define a default order which they prefer there are now two more options in Options->System called ZM_EVENT_SORT_FIELD and ZM_EVENT_SORT_ORDER which allow you to choose your own sort type and order. The default for these is now date/time ascending meaning oldest first which is opposite to the previous default and you will need to update these options to retain the previous behaviour. Note also that this ordering applies only to event lists and not the ‘last x events’ in the watch window which are still newest first.

o FIX – A curious problem with logging in on PHP 4.4 has now been fixed.

o FEATURE – Following requests and some confusion about how often filters are executed versus reloaded from the database, this is now a configurable options (Options->System-> ZM_FILTER_EXECUTE_INTERVAL). Please read the help on this option for guidance on what values to use.

o FEATURE – A ‘Filters’ button has been added to the main console view allowing easier access to the filters view.

o FEATURE – Support for the HTTPS protocol has been added allowing streaming etc to function over secure links.

o FEATURE – The layout and functionality of the XHTML screens has been enhanced to make them more useful overall.

o FEATURE – Following virtual extinction of donations I have added a small one time nag screen which invites you to donate to ZoneMinder after a month of use. That’s all it does and once dismissed you will never see it again!

o LANGUAGE – A lot of new tokens have been added. These have been included in all the language files in English. It would be appreciated if anyone who is able to edit their zm_lang_xx_yy.php language files and translate these tokens could email them back to me so I can include them in future releases.

[zoneminder]

Although the upgrade instructions are in the README, I am posting them here (in abbreviated form) as a free public service. If you want more detailed instructions please look in that document.

1) Stop ZoneMinder if it is running

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zmpkg.pl stop

Note, you may need to be root or a privileged user to issue this command.

2) Unpack your ZM distribution

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tar xvfz zm-1.21.4.tar.gz

3) Change to ZM directory

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cd zm-1.21.4

4) Configure ZM

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./configure --with-webdir=<your web directory> --with-cgidir=<your cgi directory>

Note, you may have to pass additional options to configure on your system. As of version 1.21.4 you do not usually need to pass the --with-mysql option. You can find the previous options you passed to configure in config.log in your previous build directory.

5) Backup database (optional)

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mysqldump --add-drop-table --databases zm > zm.dump

or

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mysqldump --add-drop-table --databases zm | gzip > zm.dump.gz

Note, if you have a large database and/or limited disk space you may wish to skip this step. However if you don't create a backup you will obviously not be able to recover the situation if the upgrade goes wrong.

6) Run zmconfig.pl

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perl zmconfig.pl

to enter the initial database options manually, or copy the zmconfig.txt file from your previous build directory and type

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perl zmconfig.pl -noi

7) Build ZoneMinder

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make

8) Install ZoneMinder

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make install

9) Upgrade the database

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zmupdate.pl –version=<previous version> [--user=<db user> --pass=<db password>]

Note, you may need to be root or another privileged user to run this command. The ‘user’ and ‘pass’ options allow you to specify a database user and password with sufficient privilege to ‘alter’ the structure of the database. This is not necessarily the database user you use for ZoneMinder.

10) Start ZoneMinder

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zmpkg.pl start

Note, you may need to be root or a privileged user to issue this command.

After restarting ZM you should check /var/log/messages and the other ZoneMinder logs for the first few minutes to ensure that everything comes back up successfully. You should also check that your configuration etc are as you expect. If there is a problem you can restore your database and start again.

Phil