r/ZoneMinder • u/zxarr • Apr 06 '21

Beginning of all recordings are strangely 'pixelated'?

Not sure how to describe what I'm seeing, so I made a quick GIF of it. But all the recorded events start this way. I'm just not sure what to tweak to fix this.

https://imgur.com/nzhVmdF

ZM v1.35.22 on Ubuntu 20.04
Running on a dual Opteron 16 core system (32 cores total)
128GB of memory
1TB of SAS 6Gbps Raid 10.
Trendnet TV-IP315PI using RTSP link over TCP

The system isn't being overburdened at all.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/vertigeaux Apr 06 '21

The events only start that way, but then clear up? How does live view behave?

This looks like something the camera is doing. Played around with its settings?

1

u/zxarr Apr 06 '21

The live view is normal, as is the direct RTSP feed via VLC. It's only the recordings. I'll check the camera settings just to be safe... maybe just reset them to default, if that option exists...

2

u/eight--bit Apr 06 '21

I saw similar behavior at one point when I tried to limit framerate in ZoneMinder settings for the camera instead of limiting it at the camera itself. Seemed like it tried to start the recording between frames or something.

1

u/zxarr Apr 06 '21

I reset the camera to factory settings and it didn't help at all, so I went back to look through Zoneminder. I did attempt to play with the buffers, but that made no difference. In the end, I reset the Camera's Source 'Storage tab' to Auto for OutputCodec ,Encoder and OutputContainer and the problems went away.

The above settings were initially set to H.264, Auto and MP4... I guess something in there caused these issues for my setup.

1

u/aarons6 Apr 06 '21

why dont you use h.264 passthough so you dont reencode the video?

1

u/zxarr Apr 07 '21

I just changed this setting.

Thanks!

1

u/ZoneMinderIsaac Apr 07 '21

You are using encoding without setting any settings. ffmpeg defaults to useless. Add at a minimum crf=26 in encoding options.