ZoneMinder 1.22.1 Released

[zoneminder]

For any brave early adopters I'm pleased to announce that ZoneMinder version 1.22.1 is available for download today. I will do a fully announced release in a couple of days provided no major bugs arise.

This release features some requested new features as well as quite a few fixes to problems found in 1.22.0. There may be expected features not present in this release but thesse wil hopefully appear soon as I would like to move to a monthly release cycle if possible.

The principle new features in this release revolve around the ability to link monitors so that one monitor can trigger an alarm in another. Consequently events now may have causes other than motion and external triggers and all causes for an event are now recorded in the cause and notes fields of the event record in the database and can be filtered on.

Full details of the changes are described below (taken from the README) :-

o FEATURE – Monitors can now be linked so activity on one, triggers events on another. This allows area wide surveillance by enabling one key monitor to control several others, though they can still be configured to detect motion themselves.

o FEATURE – Events can now have more than one cause. Previously if an event was triggered by motion, other stimuli would be ignored. Now if an event is caused by both motion and a linked monitor (perhaps covering the same field of view), this is indicated in the ‘cause’ field of the event. Note that the cause of event is established on the first alarmed frame, so if motion is detected and then one frame later an trigger is detected, only the motion will be recorded as the cause as the monitor will be in an alarmed state by the time the second cause arrives.

o FEATURE – The event Notes/Description field is now more useful. If an event is triggered by motion, this field contains a record or which zone detected the motion. If an event was triggered by a linked monitor then the monitor in question is recorded and so on. This allows filtering on more specific indicators.

o FEATURE – All temporary files such as thumbnail images, now go in the ‘images’ directory rather than in the specific event directory. They are then periodically removed by zmaudit when over a certain age. This means that if you are archiving off event directories you will not end up copying a load of thumbnails and smaller images of various sizes. The treatment of thumbnails etc has also been rationalised in general.

o FEATURE – The groups view has been further modified to make group modification use the same paradigm as the rest of the web interface. This has also simplified it somewhat.

o FEATURE – All views where you need to select a list of monitor ids now give you the choice of using a selector that lists the monitor names and not just their ids.

o FEATURE – The zmdc.pl script that controls the ZoneMinder daemons has been modified to make it clearer in the logs when a process has crashed, exited abnormally (i.e. with a non-zero status) or normally. An abnormal exit is not necessarily a bad thing, whereas a crash always is.

o FEATURE – The average difference of all alarmed pixels is now available in event statistics. Note that this is the mean of the differences between a pixel and it’s counterpart in the reference image, but only for pixels where this difference is inside the pixel difference thresholds specified in the zone configuration. In other words it is not the mean difference of all pixels, just those that initially contributed to an alarm. This allows you to determine the effects of modifying the thresholds by seeing what effect that has on the mean difference.

o FEATURE – The zmfix utility now corrects permission on any active PTZ control devices, .e.g. serial port devices, as well as video devices.

o FEATURE – The zmpkg.pl control script now has the ability to use ‘sudo’ to execute commands as the web user and will only fall back to ‘su’ if this fails. This should allow it to be more compatible across distributions.

o FEATURE – Deleting events will now ask for a confirmation before proceeding.

o FEATURE – Black and White settings for Axis cameras have been added to the monitor presets.

o FEATURE – Settings for Gadspot cameras have been added to the monitor presets.

o FEATURE – Most dates now use strftime to make them locale aware. This should help avoid some of the problems associated with dates for languages other than English. Ultimately these formats will probably be moved to be configurable but for now they can be found defined in zm_config.php for general formats or zm_html_view_timeline.php for timeline specific ones.

o FEATURE – The global ‘ZM_NO_MAX_FPS_ON_ALARM’ option has been replaced by a ‘Maximum Alarm FPS’ settings for each monitor. This means that you can now choose whether to limit the frame rate when an alarm occurs on a per monitor basis and can configure monitors to have a higher frame rate but not unlimited whereas previously it was the normal frame or unlimited with no facility for more precise configuration.

o FEATURE – Added facility for executing binaries to dump a backtrace to the logs on receipt of a fatal signal. This should help debugging should any crashes occur. However it does depend on those facilities being available on the host system. If they are not then this feature will be disabled. It can also be disabled via the –enable-crashtrace=no option to configure.

o FEATURE – Configuration of local monitors now includes more drop down selectors to guide users towards sensible values.

o FEATURE – Some scripts have been modified or added to make creation of rpms or other packages easier.

o FIX – The monitor creation/modification dialog previously had virtually no validation, allowing creation of monitors with bogus, meaningless or dangerous properties. This has been corrected to impose meaningful and valid settings.

o FIX – The Zone presets included in 1.22.0 were set to be a little too sensitive. They have been amended to make them have more of a range of sensitivity.

o FIX – Scripts are able to use a local zm.conf file in the current directory in preference to the installed system one. This is most useful for zmupdate.pl but can apply to all scripts for testing. Previously this local file was used silently which may cause some confusion. A warning is now emitted if the installed zm.conf file is being overridden by a local one.

o FIX – The zmu tool crashed when querying zones. This has been fixed and more useful output emitted, including the dimensions of the zones.

o FIX – The ‘message’ email address was sometimes ignored and the ‘email’ address used instead. This has been corrected.

o FIX – The zm_action.php file was a bit broken 1.22.0 particular when creating and deleting monitors. This has been fixed and the file has been tidied up to make it easier to maintain and understand.

o FIX – Some references were maintained to free’ mysql query data. This has been fixed to use copies.

o FIX – Problems with incorrect JPEG quality settings had crept back in so the wrong setting, or even default settings were being used and the appropriate setting was being ignored.

o FIX – The capture daemon for remote cameras will not exit in a more graceful and controlled manner when it is unable to fetch remote images.

o FIX – Editing the camera control capabilities was broken in 1.22.0 meaning changes were not being saved. This is now fixed.

o FIX – There was a missing terminating character in the configuration for the default email and message formats. This resulted in these fields being blank. These configuration options have now been split into subject and body formats for both to make them easier to maintain..

o FIX – Saving run states omitted the ‘enabled’ flag meaning that the saved value was not correct. This has been fixed.

o FIX – Some configuration was moved to a category which had no tab in the Options window and so became inaccessible except directly via the database. This has been resolved, and the categories restructured slightly to be more appropriate.

o FIX – Some web forms have been modified to use ‘post’ rather than ‘get’ allowing more data to be passed without error for large operations.

o FIX – A number of minor video generation issues have been fixed.

o FIX – The zone polygon editing view should now work on all browsers including Internet Explorer.

o FIX – A number of xHTML syntactical errors have been found and fixed in the xHTML view files.

o FIX – A problem with the incorrect specification of the preset to return to if auto-tracking motion has been found and fixed.

o FIX – A crash in zmu when using the ‘-l’ options has been corrected.

o FIX – When viewing events from the timeline view, the filter used to select them is now passed meaning that scrolling between events now behaves as expected.

o FIX – Where necessary %f formats in sprintf have been changed to %F to ensure ffmpeg compatible, and non-locate aware, floating point formats are used. This fix is only effective for php versions 4.3.10 and later.

o FIX – Fixed an issue where deleting the last page of events generated an empty page.

o FIX – Fixed a problem where the stills view for Record’ed or Mocord’ed events did not display correctly.

o FIX – Fixed a problem with loaded filters being unable to be edited to have more or fewer terms.

o FIX – Fixed the script debugging library to not try and interpret % characters in debug as formatting.

o FIX – Fixed (hopefully) an issue where md5.h was incorrectly identified by configure as being missing.

o LANGUAGE – The two existing Italian language files have been merged into one and updated.

o LANGUAGE – A new Swedish translation has been added.

[zoneminder]

Version 1.22.1 has now been fully released and is available from the downloads page as usual.