ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,
A month or two back I installed zoneminder and tried to get it working with a webcam. It turned out the webcam I was using was incompatible with Zoneminder, so I gave up on that. Now I've finally gotten my Kworld SEC800B security card and a Swan outdoor security camera.

Now, I should state that my system just barely meets the minimum system requirements listed on the graphics card, and whenever I try to use xawtv or something similar to look at the input, my computer freezes up and I have to restart X. I believe this is because of a lack of resources, although I may be mistaken.

When I try to add a monitor from the card in Zoneminder, I get nothing but a blank screen (black if I have my color settings on greyscale, red if RGB 24, blue if anything else). It also has the monitor name and the time, but it doesn't show the picture that's coming through the camera. I know the camera is ok, because I've tested it on my television. I've heard reports of other people getting the card to work with Zoneminder.

Can anyone give me any advice for getting my camera/video card working?

you will probably need to force a card type when you boot linux, unfortunatly i dont know yor card but if you can find the number for it you need to add the following to your modprobe.conf file

options bttv card=??

save and reboot

you could try 77 in there or 77,77 etc for the number of chips on the card

James

That would be /etc/modprobe.conf?

yes but im not sure on the 77 but you cant do any harm without a screwdriver lol

That didn't seem to solve my problem. Where would I go about finding what number I need to use?
-Edit-
I tried the number 78. Now I find that channels 1, 2, and 3 show up red (RGB24), but channel 0 shows up black.

/usr/src/linux/Documentation/video4linux/

Serch for CARDLIST file there....

but i think You should study chips on Your card first... coz first of all
You should know your chipset...

i am not really familiar with ZM(i got some problems with it --- one actually) but i am really like it...
i think You should give us logs outputs and dmesg| grep bttv
bttv or whatever Your drivers are....

I don't have a /usr/src/linux/ directory. I haven't mentioned, but my distro is Ubuntu. I know there are people who have gotten ZM to work on Ubuntu, but they may have had to take some different route.

Also, how do I "study the chips on My card?" This is all relatively new to me, and that doesn't give me enough information as to how to go about studying it.


Also, here is dmesg | grep bttv

Ok, in this post cordel said that this card should not need any modifications to modprobe.conf.

As stated before, I know the camera is fine, because I get a signal out of it on my television.

Additionaly, I've found that if I plug it into my security card and watch the monitor as I turn the power to the camera on and off, it alternates between red (off) and black (on).

Is it possible that my system resources are simply too low to get a decent image out of it? I'm running with 128 MB of RAM and a 750 Mhz processor. The card has a minimum requirement of 600 Mhz and 128 mb ram.

Should I try it in a more powerful system, or does it sound like there's a problem somewhere else?

it could be your ram the lowest i have ever tested zm is 256 meg but i think the new live cd supports 128 meg min, but is your gfx integrated is that robbing some ram could you change the allocation in the bios to like 8 or 16 meg

kworld cards are very different from the kodicom cards and they usualy use a different chipset (Phillips). The newer kernels are suppost to support it (2.6.15) but I have yet to confirm it. Most everything I have here is still FC3 and till 1.22.1 is out and packaged for FC3 I don't have any plans to update to FC4 till after that time.
FC3 Is also now part of the lagacy project so I look forward to moving on and creating the new distros.

Check your cardlist that sould be in your kernel docs (some distro's have this as a seperate package). I have a kworld atsc-110 here that does not do so well with 2.6.12 kernel but is supposed to work under 2.6.15 (fingers crossed).

Regards,
Corey

corey do we have to move to fc4 to get the newer kernels can we just upgrade the kernel in fc3?

I had thought about doing that. The reasons I decided against it:
1) Someone would have to maintain it (security updates ect....)
2) You might also have to back port several other packages like udev.
3) FC is a fast moving Distro (by design)

The alternative would be a slower Distro but, then you would not see the latest kernel which is what we want to have the most recent drivers developed in the kernel.

Now upgrading my distros should not to to terribly difficult, and would be even easier had I knew a few things before I committed the iso to the public. Since it was my first, and I haven't yet created a new distro, I don't know what to expect. I do know that I should have given a different value in one place and since I didn't, that might require you to add some thing like linux upgradeany (I'm guessing, I used the command once a year ago) to the command line when you boot from the new CD yet to be produced.

Regards,
Corey

i see. When you say slower distro something like centos? I agree and disagree with myself here, cos i want stability ong upgrade path etc but i also want the newest hardware supported so i suppose that answers the question lol.

James

I'm a bit confused. There are reports of the card working as far back as July of 2004, now I'm hearing that it doesn't work with more recent versions of the kernel?

What options does that give me? Should I try a different distro with a more recent kernel? Finding a different card is going to be difficult on my budget, but I suppose that might be an option.

Realistically, if you already have a system setup and it already supports the hardware your using, there is no need to update the distro. I will be supporting FC3 packages till it falls of the legacy project.
I'm tring to decide if the next distro will be FC4 or FC5 based. I'm thinking of just skipping 4 and going for 5 since the 3rd test release is out the FC5 release is sceduled for some time this March (not far away).

Corey