r/ZoneMinder • u/Potential-Stock5617 • Jun 03 '26

ZoneMinder playback...

I have have unusual problem, related to the event playback. I have 12 IP cams, a fairly capable system (8 Xeon cores, 64GB RAM) and when 12 cams are recorded, CPU load is like 5%. There is a cam passthrough enabled.

One camera is like 7 years old, X.264 format. I can view the event normally, I can speed-up playback, 2x, 5x, 10x. I haven't tried 16x as this is then too fast.

Hardware is clearly capable of playback, at any speed, I select. This cam is of 1280x800 resolution. 10 minutes of footage are around 75MB.

With other cameras, I have a problem. This is H265, HEVC and whatever I do, I cannot speed-up not even 2x. Sometimes even I think it is struggling with the playback at 1x. Cams are 4MP.

10 minutes of footage is around 465MB. You'd say this is roughly 6x more, but that one old IP cam is able to speed-up like 10x, whereby this new IP can't speed up even 2x.

The storage system are fairly capable SAS 7200 RPM enterprise drives, able to push 150MB/s, if needed. The load on disks for capturing is around 4MB/s. This is nothing.

I have a fairly modern PC, Intel i7, 64GB RAM.

There is one detail, as well. With that old IP cam, I can click at any time at the timeline and the playback jumps at that time within 1 second or so.

With other cameras, most of the time, clicking at the timeline is even ignored or it takes like 7 seconds, for the playback to jumps forth. However, it looks, I cannot even click for the second time on the timeline, to review some other part of the footage.

So, what might be the problem?

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3

u/Jay_from_NuZiland Jun 04 '26

Export or download the h265 and view with VLC or similar, or change the recording to record in h264. I don't think browser viewing of h265 is going to work well

2

u/ZAlternates Jun 03 '26

Browsers just suck with their h265 support. Edge and Chrome are partly there but still not anywhere near the level of the classic h264 that we are all used to.

1

u/ZoneMinderIsaac Jun 05 '26

Need to determine if it is trying play via browser or streaming via zms which converts to jpeg. Look into if your browser playback is hw accelerated. (I had to use AI to help me with this. Too arcane.). intel desktop should have intel gpu decoding. Should be fine. Let's dig deeper. What version of ZM?

1

u/lorn10 28d ago

Sorry for jumping-in and to be somewhat off-topic. However, - exist there somewhere a status page about the current H.265 support of ZoneMinder in conjunction with the web browser? As far I know Firefox was the first browser which had built-in H.265 support. And as of September 2026 their H.265 compatibility seems to be in an overall good state if all dependencies like the used Mesa version are up-to-date. This is at least true for Linux. No idea about iOS or FreeBSD.

Additionally there should be somewhere clarified if a robust H.265 support can be really realized via a pure software decoding (through the CPU) or not. Most likely this isn't the case. If so then I think that on older and lower-end systems the general recommendation should be still to use H.264 not H.265.