#zoneminder

Any idea how to get jpg or mjpeg out of Hikvision? I am told rstp -> ffmpeg is taking to much CPU power

MillerBoss: don't know about that, but I saw your vmstat and it's definitely cpu-bound, so you're on the right track.

Hey amrak

I got this earlier: [07:48:24] < ic0n>MillerBoss: The pics you've shown clearly show that you are cpu bound. You have to understand that an ffmpeg stream is likely h264, so your cpu is spending all it's time decoding h264. Try the remote method, and go for the jpg snapshot or mjpeg url.

But these hikvision cams dont seem to output jpg or mjpeg

yep, that's pretty much what you need there

have you looked at the manual yet?

For Zoneminder or the cams?

for the cams

there's usually some URL where you get a JPG of the current image

http://www.hikvision.com/UploadFile/image/20131... Page 38 "When the Stream Type of the camera is sub-stream, the Video Encoding standard

can be set to H.264, MJPEG" Video Encoding only has H.264 as an option. I wonder if I need different cameras.

morny

MillerBoss, do you need to motion detect?

i record 24/7 with no detection

using feature-h264-branch from the git (have to self compile: easy it's in the INSTALL)

use h264 passthrough for storage

and turn off any jpg storage + turn off any modect ... delete the modect zones and reduce buffers to bare minimum

currently ive 3 1080p cams at 5fps and 4 1280*1024 (mjpg-streams being x264 coded) also at 5fps

ld avg is about 0.4-1.8 most of the time on a xeon

which cams are they MillerBoss ?

major advantages are #1 there are no eleventy-million jpgs to store and volume of storage mp4 is about 1/10th that of jpgs

#2 purge when full filter takes but a few moments cos an event is a single mp4 file not twelvety-thousand jpgs doing rm -rf

#3 storage is easy onthe disks ... many streams of many jpgs thrashes the disks vs some mp4's being written

hopefully h264 and vid storage will be merged into master soon ?

i hope to start playing with pir sensors ie the cheap type that you get with alarm systems 12v feed + simple 1/0 signal on 3rd wire and use that to signal marking of frames in zm

rather than using motion detect in either zm or the cam

very much less prone to false positives etc

and very well understood + highly tunable

feature-h264 ads by jzaw are my favourite

knnniggett, you asked why I don't like Milestone?

I was curious what you didn't like about that product

A couple of things. Mainly it's the license. If you exceed 50 cameras or so, it get ridiculously expensive

To the point where buying a 2nd server is cheaper

Milestone requires you to upload the MAC address of each camera to their website.... I've always hated that.

Yeah, their licensing is crap

And their smart client. It decodes all cameras at full resolution, and the hardware acceleration doesn't really work

You won't be able to attach near as many cameras per server for ZoneMinder currently, but of course there are no license fees.

rexd666, ads?

Oh. what's the bottleneck?

jzaw the posts about Major advantages #1 #2

Stabington_work: ZoneMinder transcodes all incoming streams to jpeg. In the future you'll have the option to record to mp4, but not today

hehe

jpeg.. wow

Why not HEVC :D

offload to vid card would be interesting too

(all in due course i expect)

Stabington_work: The code that does the work is the same since 2002. It needs to change, but we currently do this work in our spare time so progress can be slow. We are looking to find a way to pay ourselves so we could work on the project full time, and consequently improve the code faster

knnniggett, any chance some (possibly chinese) manufacturer could *sponsor* the dev

with kit and funds

like ubnt ... and produce a zm box aka dvr

And you would just load the server up decoding h264 streams and then encode them to HEVC, better to take the native streams from cameras, which I expect will start to move onto new options soon

We've talked about something just like that. Would like to learn how to find someone willing to do that, and of course we need to have a basis of trust with the person or group

Yea, Vivotek is moving towards HEVC streams

I would use VAST, but their motion detection is a chore

jzaw: every now and then I get excited about video cards, but most stuff seems to point to loading and unloading the video to the video card takes longer. Their normal mode of operation is take video, decode and display to screen

ah right

But yea, rexd666 has a fair point. Transcoding is quite taxing

so basically better to have a cpu with more grunt?

jzaw: The best approach is to not transcode on the server at all. Then the server doesn't need lots of cpu.

so really points to either have the cams do their own modect (one of the analyses that can be done) rather than centralise it in the zm box

yeah knnniggett

or like i plan to do ... *modect* by other means ie i/o from pirs

If you see a commerical product that advertises 128+ cameras per server that is how they are doing it.... they are recording the native stream straight to the hard disk w/o transcoding. ....but they also rely on the camera to tell the server when motion has occurred so that is the downside

Stabington_work: some of the guys do offer services around zm, but you specified easy to setup, not sure I can honestly say yes. For me yes, but learning curve is steep and we are all part-timers so it doesn’t compare to commercial products with full time teams. But it is free and I know some of the guys in here run larger setups in commerical environment

I suspected as much. My co-workers all get a specific look on their face when I mention Linux :D

hehe

It's not a nice look

hey guys :)

o/

^ That's exactly the same response I get at my day job

knnniggett: is that how Milestone works I have a Smartclient on the desk next to me at work and have had a look at the server to see if I could work out where the motion was detecting?

I'll do it on purpose jsut for shock value these days

hm. it always depends on what they compare it with.

Maybe you guys have some input on an issue I'm facing atm. I started less than a year ago in this company that provides surveillance in quite a few locations. But the previous guy was not very... knowledgable.

rexd666: In Milestone, if you are using a driver specific for the make/model of camera (not their ONVIF driver), then the motion detection will come from the camera.

rexd666: Perhaps you know this, but you can download a free version of Milestone from their site. It is limited to 8 cameras and 5 days of storage

So, he ordered pre-installed servers with 32-bit Windows, 4 GB RAM, and 3x 2TB HDDs in RAID 5...

We are running milestone with 40+ cameras on that hardware..

So we just started monitoring the performance on those servers. The page file is being used a lot :D

Disk busy time is 100%

Constant write queue

We have an older server with 20 cameras and it is a 12 or 16bay chassis not sure how many disks but more than 3 for sure. I can check it Monday

The first issue of "32-bit Windows ohgodwhy" is easy to fix

But with the disks in RAID 5, how would you go about setting up the video storage?

I take it RAID 5 is not very viable with such a heavy disk IO

uh. do you have battery backed cache?

Probably not. I'll check

i'd say raid 5 is a good tradeoff between speed and reliability if you have enough disks in the set.

Stabington_work: You need to run Milestone's storage calculator on their site. You plug in all the parameters of your cameras, and it will tell you things like peak bandwidth, throughput, days of storage, etc. Only when you have this information can one determine what hardware is sufficient.

No batteries in sight

oh :(

But not too many as then you lose a disk in rebuild, ala the file server at my work last year

rexd666: yeah. better switch to raid 6 then ...

and have enough hot standbys.

moved out of IT department so now I am the greatest armchair critic they have

hehe. perfect!

morons

I was considering RAID 10. Our surveillance servers rarely (if ever) use 4 TB

Stabington_work: raid 10 is gonna be hard with 3 disks ^^

sorry ^^

Well yea, but disks are relatively cheap

do the calculator as it will be write performance I suspect with 40 cameras even at 720

yup.

Yeap. I don't need to use a calculator to figure that out :P

But it will tell you what you need to get from the disks

what brand are the servers?

It's some custom built crap

Was probably expensive as all hell

ouch.

Is there a camera brand surveilon or something like that?

trying to remember what my work ones are

Nah, it's just a very powerful workstation with a RAID controller, essentially

still that sucks in terms of performance.

You don't have to tell me.. :P

Stabington_work: because you probably can't add another 10 disks or something like that.

Surveon was the one I was looking for

Nah, it only has 8 slots

that's at least a decent size for a raid 10

I don't think I actually need more than 2 disks if I use RAID 0