ZoneMinder Forums

It occurred to me today (in a blinding flash of the obvious) that ZM can be a useful tool for tracking, say, weather webcams and radar/satellite images, located on servers out across the web.

For this sort of work, of course, you would want to be able to specify a *really* low frame rate.

I'm trying this out on a couple of weather.com radar maps, but I'm not sure what the specified behaviour should be for an FPS of .01.

Should the program Do The Right Thing with a .01 FPS setting? If not (and here's the feech part of our afternoon's posting) would it be difficult to add a feature where, say, an FPS of "-60" meant "pull a frame once every 60 seconds"?

you should be fine with network 'cams' on 0.01 fps and it will work as you expect. I remeber trying this a while ago following a similar question. I beleive if you go slower than 0.01 you will have strange issues ie 0.009 etc. or it might have been 0.1 slowest. Either way you could use a 0.1 and a frameskip of say 10. I use fractions regular anything from .25 to .75 rather than the usual 2, 3 or 5.
Another thing you could do is use a script to grab a frame from zms and save it and use cron to fire the script

As a followup, apparently zmc doesn't understand GIF:

Jun 18 15:18:17 frank zmc_m5[31478]: ERR [Unrecognised content type 'image/gif']
Jun 18 15:18:17 frank zmdc[14783]: ERR ['zmc -m 5' exited abnormally, exit statu
s 255]

Would that be incredibly hard to fix?

lol i dont know. I have only tried using jpegs. I would assume its quite a job yeah. Althought it maybe a library thing. I think i remeber reading an old post (like years old) that zm used to work with gifs but was problematic, but that might have been animated gifs im not sure. We had better leave this for phil. I would think though if all you want to do is save an image every n minutes a script using wget would be better, also due to the low frame rates you could always wget the gif, convert to jpeg then use zm in file mode