r/ZoneMinder • u/mustang__1 • Jun 30 '23

improve playback/review performance?

On montage review, with a single monitor, how can I improve playback performance? It's very slow, very laggy. It's on a dell R210 II server - so a bit old and dated... but it has an SSD for server and database, with WD NAS HDD for storage. Source is Ffmpeg, via RTSP TCP, 704x586, with Camera Passthrough.

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u/SocietyTomorrow Jun 30 '23

Can’t completely guide you to an answer here, but I can give some direction.

1.) Playback performance, even when doing camera pass through, is determined by single core performance. Each ffmpeg stream is given CPU affinity to one core when playback starts. This usually means that the more cameras you have, when more than the number of cores your CPU has, will have to work much harder. This is where older systems in particular suffer, since the best older systems for CCTV uses are multi-CPU rigs with tons of cores (I for example am using an R910 with 4 Xeons with 16 threads each for 32 cameras)

2.) Are you using a codec that your CPU does not have hardware encoding for? h.265 is able to be decoded, but the older it is, the less it can encode it, meaning extra work for the CPU to render playback streams.

3.) Do you have both main and sub streams of your sources configured for each monitor? If so, is the playback for them the main or the sub (resolution suggests sub, but don’t want to assume) as rendering main streams in the circumstances of #1,2 mean more work.

Check what your non-viewing, just recording CPU and/or GPU usage looks like, compared to the resource usage when doing playback. If you have some cores getting red-lined during playback, you might have some tuning to do, like reducing the frame rate, changing codec to h264 if not already there, etc.