Topic: zoneminder-videomonitoring on sme 6.0.1-01 + updatescript

[wa4bro]

Hi All,

  How do i test this with low cost and what sort of H/W should i use? Thanks.

Video processing, especially to it's full extent does take a little horsepower. Especially when generating mpg video streams. I use Zoneminder on two machines, One an xp2500 chip with 1 meg memory and another on a Pen4 2.4ghz with 1.5gig memory. It runs great on both machines with the Pent4 being a little faster.

Video does require memory, the more the better. The good thing is memory is pretty cheap these days.

It will run on slower machines with less memory but some processes take a long time. Especiallly if you want to generate a downloadable video to your windows client. On average 10 mins of decent quality video will normally be a 30-40 meg file. It takes some time and CPU cycles to produce this.... even on a faster machine. But for just video monitoring, it really does not require that much horsepower to watch a .jpg produced java scripted viewer that is built in to zoneminder.

As far as cams, my initial testing came from a one dollar usb web cam that took 17 dollars to ship from Hong Kong off of ebay. It used the spa50xx driver. The quality of the cam was poor (hey it was only a dollar) and was cmos sensor. I highly suggest some sort of Brooktree capture card and a real CCD camera for the best video.  Most decent CCD security cameras will run from $79.00-$199.00 USD plus the capture cards witht he brooktree chip can run from $19.95 to hundreds of dollars depending on number of chips and ports on board.

There are quite a few USB cams on the higher end ($69.00 to $129.00 USD) than produce multi pixel video now days. These would be perfect for an office set up to watch say the door , desk area near the machine etc. The problem with USB is limited to the distance of the usb cable.

The brooktree chip capture card, Good CCD security camera and maybe a wireless transmiiter/reciever makes a pretty good combo. This is what I use for my web cam setup on http://roswellweather.net

It is a solar powered camera, 2.4ghz transmitter and receiver combo and a 4 port capture card on the computer. Currently it is window based, but my goal is to move it to sme 7.0 when released with a zoneminder feed.  Currently Windows XP needs a reboot every few days as usual to keep it running many tasks at the same time. I hope SME/ZONEMINDER will eventually make it a set forget option.

BTW you can grab just a single image for use on web pages etc with a command line url to zoneminder. I may cover this later in a HowTo

Again, Many thanks to Chaapai for providing Zoneminder to the SME community

Enjoy,

Dan

[morpheusx]

Thanks to Chaapai and everyone who posted such helpful info in this thread. I plan to use ZM with a network camera so I guess I don't need the video drivers etc.

I am running SME 7.0b4. I followed the instructions to add the yum info but the install just hangs during download as far as I can tell.

What am I doing wrong?

[root@cartman ~]# echo "contribchaapai=repository|BaseURL|ftp://ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net/yum-smeserver/7.0beta/smechaapai/\$basearch|EnableGroups|0|GPGCheck|0|Name|SME Server - Chaapai contribs|status|enabled">>/home/e-smith/db/yum_repositories
[root@cartman ~]#  /sbin/e-smith/expand-template /etc/yum.conf
[root@cartman ~]# yum install zm
Setting up Install Process
Setting up Repos
smeaddons                 100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
contrib                   100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00    
updates                   100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
contribchaapai            100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
smeos                     100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
smeupdates                100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
Reading repository metadata in from local files
base      : ################################################## 1406/1406
updates   : ################################################## 178/178
primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================|  10 kB    00:00    
MD Read   : ################################################## 34/34
contribcha: ################################################## 34/34
smeos     : ################################################## 433/433
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Downloading header for zm to pack into transaction set.
zm-1.21.3-01.sme7.i386.rp 100% |=========================|  25 kB    00:00    

(my terminal session hangs at this point)

if I abort it gets a little further then hangs up again

--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package zm.i386 0:1.21.3-01.sme7 set to be updated
--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Dependency: libmp3lame.so.0 for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: perl-Device-SerialPort for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: zm-lat_ibay = 1.21.3 for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: perl-Archive-Tar for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: libavformat.so for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: lame for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: perl-Archive-Zip for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: perl(Device::SerialPort) for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: ffmpeg for package: zm
--> Processing Dependency: libavcodec.so for package: zm
--> Restarting Dependency Resolution with new changes.
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Downloading header for ffmpeg to pack into transaction set.
ffmpeg-0.4.8-01.el4.i386. 100% |=========================| 8.0 kB    00:00

then I get an error which looks like the ftp is down

[root@cartman ~]# yum install zm
Setting up Install Process
Setting up Repos
smeaddons                 100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
contrib                   100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00    
updates                   100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
ftp://ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net/yum-smeserver/7.0beta/smechaapai/i386/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 4] IOError: [Errno ftp error]
Trying other mirror.
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: contribchaapai
failure: repodata/repomd.xml from contribchaapai: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

I can ftp to ftp://ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net but it doesn't allow anonymous login.

root@cartman ~]# wget ftp://ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net/yum-smeserver/7.0beta/smechaapai/i386/repodata/repomd.xml
--22:51:01--  ftp://ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net/yum-smeserver/7.0beta/smechaapai/i386/repodata/repomd.xml
           => repomd.xml'
Resolving ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net... 212.195.38.21
Connecting to ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net[212.195.38.21]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ...
Login incorrect.

[wa4bro]

I am not around my test machine right now, but I think I had to change the yum url to

ftp://ftp.chaapai.homelinux.net/yum-smeserver/7.0beta/smechaapai/i386/

to get it to work.

Dan

[wa4bro]

I've used Zoneminder quite a lot - but never on an SME server.  Main problem is that there ain't no X-Server!

What I do is simply put Zoneminder onto another box -Slackware, in my case - and then pipe the output through the SME server.  That way the SME server is not soaked doing all the video processing and the Zoneminder box is carefully hidden from prying eyes!

---Just my take on it, you know!

Regards,

Dave

Dave,

A couple of folks have asked how you did this ?
Can you expand on your post?
Thanks,
Dan

[bovnet]

After my alloys where stolen i set up the zoneminder livecd on a 2.8ghz 500 meg ram machine with 2 4port/4chip bttv cards. It never stayed up much longer than a few hours to a day or 2.

With the excellent SME7/yum install its rock steady, yes there is no x but that was a real cpu and resource killer. I set up a seperate old computer using kioskcd linux for viewing.

Whilst most may reckon its not good practice to run things such a zoneminder on a server, i reckon it could handle modest server load too.

I have used SME7 purely as a base for zoneminder in a dedicated box mainly due to the fact that i dont want to mess migrating my SME6 web server.

I would however be interested in how it is possible to as you say pipe pictures across.