ZoneMinder Forums

Okay, so I gave up on trying to compile zoneminder on Ubuntu and went to Mandriva and installed via RPM. I now have a working copy of zoneminder as far as I can tell, but I wanted to test the software out with my existing hardware prior to buying a dedicated multi-camera board.

I have my camera hooked up to a PVR-250 (which works, I can run mplayer /dev/video1 and I see the camera). However, the camera comes up red in zoneminder and if I click on it anyway it gives me a broken link image instead of a camera image. My second capture card is an HD3000, and the analog tuner seems to work okay (but the HD3000 is being used for HD capture, so I don't want to tie it up playing with zoneminder).

Is there a trick to getting ZM to work with a hardware capture board that I've missed? I apologize if this has been asked before, but I only found one other thread on this and it seemed to focus on trouble shooting the hardware.

One note: the PVR-250 does not work with xawtv, but it does work with mplayer or if I simply cp /dev/video1 tst.mpg.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

If your PVR is outputting mpg video then currently it won't work with ZM I'm afraid. Although input mpeg support will be coming as soon as I can get round to finishing it, at the moment unless you can get image grabs from your board you are a bit stuck.

Phil

I'm using zone minder with a PVR-350 which would have the same MPEG problem, however. I've got multiple cammers each on different channels coming in through the TV turner.

My clumsy solution was to use mplayer -vo jpeg on /dev/video32 (raw output) to generate jpeg images.

I'd like to use something that will dump the JPEG to a fifo and just keep replacing the fifo contents BUT mplayer insists on numberg the jpegs, so I have it running in a loop through each camera, capturing two frames from each camera.

ZM then just looks for the still images.

Doing it this was requires a lot of extra overhead to start mplayer once for each camera, but it works. I get about 2fps total across all cameras

Suggestions on anything else that can capture stills from raw video in a better manner would be great. Either that or pipe the raw video output to someting that ZM can understand...??