#zoneminder

hey everyone... nightly db backups are good, ok?

icon_: what do you think about adding a cron job for db backup to your ppa package? Seems like a reasonable idea.

that's exactly what I'm thinking.

I've used other ppas which added it

Good morning all. Pushing out 1.31.36 soon

moin moin

awesome icon_ the progress is pretty good.

just trying to stabilize right now.

though for whatever reason im not seeing events generated

I just updated from xenial i386 1.31.32 to 1.31.35

and it is the first time in awhile I did not have to comment out error reporting....no errors at all

in the index.php

events are recording and all systems are GO

nice work icon_

I think .35 has an issue. You will want .36

hello i am running 2 wansview wireless ip cameras at there lowest resolution 5 frames a min into zoneminder running on a 1.7ghz core2duo with 4GB of ram running xubuntu 16.04 and my cams keep intermitently going blue screen and staying that way in zoneminder even though the cams are still funtioning and i can stream them fine using vlc

kurt-ubuntu, you might not have enough horsepower

hmm

i know i cannot run full 720p but i figured it would handle 320x180

although last night when the front door camera died it was snowing and the snow was making the cameras false trigger

so load was probably heavy

if a c2d running two cameras at 320x180 is "not enough horsepower" I'd be very interested to know what exactly is happening

as that should be *overkill* for cameras of that low of resolution

kurt-ubuntu: is your load on the ZM box getting pegged during this time?

i have no idea it was the middle of the night i was asleep

but normaly even when zoneminder is saving video it is no were near pegged

now, granted, I'm running an entirely different system, but my rig is a low end/low wattage i3 3rd gen and that thing records eight 3 megapixel cameras and runs motion detect against those 8 camera's substreams, and even still the load is all but asleep, even during peak hours in the day with lots of movement

saving images

is zoneminder still doing the JPG thing?

ya

maybe that's why. that was always a source of pain when I last used zm.

I kind of thought the videostorage thing had gone official by now

is 1.30 still the latest official build?

i built iit from whatever was in the repos for xubuntu

installed it

I'm on 17.10 at the moment but I see 1.30 in the repos here

what version of xubuntu are you on

16.04

it almost has to be an old one then

if 1.30 is latest and topic says it was released 6/2016, and 16.04 was released 4/2016... there's no way that made it.

I bet that's 1.25 in repos

says v1.29

ah, 1.29

yep

I see that now

I used zm heavily in the 1.25 days so I think that version number is forever engraved in my mind :P

i could change both cameras to record and see what the load average is

recording is much lighter than motion detection for sure. ZM's issue with resource usage balloons significantly due to the JPG capture it does.

ah

For example, my server with two 1 megapixel cameras struggled -- yet my server with eight 3 megapixel cameras is all but asleep, but the system I use now does not use JPG slicing like that.

so i need to upgrade to 1.30

You gotta figure, say you have two 1 megapixel cameras @ 10 FPS each. That's 20 JPG's ZM is archiving per second and analyzing on top.

I'm not sure of the fundamental differences from 1.29 to 1.30, so I'm not necessarily suggesting that.

ok

I just thought that the pure video storage was in the final version now, but I guess not.

ah

(that was just an assumption on my part as I thought I remember high praise of that branch like 2 years ago would have made it in mainline)

sometimes i think i would have been better of to have continued in my quest to finish setting up the config files for "motion" that i was working on when a friend talked me into trying ZM

motion is a bit of an undertaking as it has no GUI, but I've used it heavily. If you have any questions feel free to hit me up on PM.

i had it working but i could only get it to work by setting the cameras to not need a password

ah, you can work around that

i could not get motion to pass the password to the cameras correctly

it's a line in the config you need to add

netcam_userpass admin:password

I'd hate to get into a discussion about an unrelated app since this is a zoneminder room, but feel free to pm me or check out their channel if that's something you want to tinker with

ok

sadly i did not keep it i would have to start all over

it's not too crazy. if you need help pm me. :)

ok

What would be the best way to get a closer look at what specific ffmpeg commands zm is using? I did not get the cpu reduction I was expecting when trying out h264 passthrough and I'm curious to figure out why.

aeonsablaze: for me lowering the fps, adjusting Iframes, bit rate and modect zone sizes lowered cpu usage

Load: 0.17 with 3 cameras in modect

Done all of those (although admittedly only briefly played with bitrate). Are your cameras h264? Because that seems to be the root of my issues.

I believe so, try to keep the zones small or rather only as big as needed.

I made adjustments (fps etc:)in the ip camera settings not in ZM

I think multiple smaller zones are better than one big one. at least for me anyway

Yep, done all that. Realistically though, the cpu usage in h264 passthrough should be negligable because it shouldn't need to encode at all, however it remains basically unchanged which tells me it is still encoding. I'm just curious to get a look at the ffmpeg under the hood to see why that might be.

aeonsablaze: maybe the image size is different in the zm monitor settings than in the Ipcamera settings? what i mentioned worked for me but maybe someone with greater knowledge will have an idea?

color depth maybe?

aeonsablaze: h264 passthrough is still doing h264 decoding. It's just not doing as much jpeg encoding. I hope soon to turn off decoding for the record case, but motion detection will still require it.

icon_: interesting, well that explains part of it. Still though, my cpu usage is pretty much identical using passthrough so presumably I must be missing something. Is there a good way to get a look at the underlying ffmpeg commands?

there arent any commands. we use it as a library

Ah, okay. That probably means more digging through code and documentation than I was hoping for, but such is life. Thanks :)