ZoneMinder Forums

I've got a USB Cam. I'm pointing it at the house accross the street because people in the neighborhood have witnessed many drug-deals. So, I'm going to capture some of it for evidence.

I'm having trouble with the settings for the zones though and I'm getting confused and frustrated. philip, if you message me directly (You can get my e-mail from my registration) I'd be happy to give you the login to my site and you can take a look.

Here's the basic deal. Since the house is so far away, I've defined specific zones for areas of the house, the door, the cars in the driveway, etc. On these zones, I set very small thresholds because sometimes the people are small or they show up small and so I want it to trigger an alarm with each movement. I was finding with the default 'all' settings that people movements weren't being picked up, only cars.

However, in RGB mode, colors are so shifty that it's in alarm mode all the time. however, with the same settings moving to Greyscale produces no alarm even with cars moving. I don't understand all the settings and wonder if someone could help me configure it.

Hi Thomas,

I'd be happy to take a look at your system. I'll mail you tomorrow or you can get me on philip.coombes@zoneminder.com if you'd prefer.

Sometimes small areas can be a problem. I have a wireless network camera and the JPEG artefacts and contouring on that are so bad that even if nothing is happening the whole image is flowing and morphing the time. Whereas my normal video cameras are crystal clear and solid. I think a lot of it depends on what compression might have been applied to the image in transit.

If we hook up in the next few days I'll try and configure your system and maybe come back here with some examples of what we did to (hopefully) improve it.

Cheers,

Phil,