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changes to zms

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:35 am
by jameswilson
This is just a suggestion to be bashed out on the forum and i know its a lot of work

First of all a little background.
I feel the way the the cctv industry is going is away from conventional cams (PAL/NTSC) and to megapixel cams. I dont think we will be using HD but i may be wrong. The reason i dismiss HD is because we will need a new transmission system and the investment from manufacturs this will need, ie ip convertes, twisted pair baluns, switchers etc etc. Unelss we come up with our own transmission system i feel we are going down the ip route for the majority of installs etc. We just need long range stuff and i suppose dsl converters will come in here.

I think we will goto high megapixel count static cameras (maybe 360 degree cameras if the pixel count is high enough or for the moment 180 degree back to back megapixels.

The biggest problem i have is with operators. If you have a ptz based system the operators are never looking at what the should the usually spend more time watching the screen with the cricket on than the guy doing a car over!

As the cam is never in the right place in the right time people are expecting more from the recorded footga ethan std cams can give. If we had for example an 8MP camera and digitaaly zoomed and panned arund the image, tjhis could be done before duroing and after the event. Even if the guard was busy/'patrolling'/away etc we will still have a great recording of the event.

Now zm can currently record megapixel cams and when we get the 8/16+ megapixel cams that im talking about here we will also have 16 core processors and plety of raw horsepower to handle em.

So can zms be chnaged in the future to allow a start and end pixel range to stream

ie zms&monitor1&scale=100&pixels=12,393,85,455 etc etc

so that from a 1280x1024 image we can select the middle 320x240
then a pan left command would be just to chnage the requested image size and zm would only stream what was required and keep bandwidth down.
Phil, i know you have talked about chnaging zms to include playback but if not i could do the same on playback after downloading the whole image.
Also zooming would be done by giving narrower stram selection. We would still need the scalling option so if a user fully zoomed out we would have to send the whole image, but not at full quality. Im thinking of using this with zm4ms so i could alter the values as required.
AM i way of the mark with this do others see the industry going in a different direction? etc etc

Points for discussion and a pure thery debate lol

Regards
James

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 9:28 pm
by zoneminder
A well argued case :lol:

I don't think this would be all that hard to do at all so I have added it to the feature list. It would definately be easier in an interative viewer though to get PTZ type feedback more quickly.

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 9:47 pm
by jameswilson
Cheers Phil.
What do you mean by easier in an interactive viewer to get ptz feedback, do you mean this way it will be near instant or do you mean asking for a larger image from zms and filtering at the client?

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:04 pm
by zoneminder
If there is a two way communications between the user and the thing (e.g. zms) that is sending the images then it is easier and quicker than having to click on a page to send a query to the server when then has to either reload a page or signal to zms which is all a bit round the houses.

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:06 pm
by jameswilson
we would have to be careful with that as i have issues with other kit and timeouts when sending images over adsl. But i know your a better coder than most!!