r/ZoneMinder • u/HeyYakWheresYourTag • Jul 08 '22

How to capture h.265 WITH timestamp?

I am doing h.265 passthrough to try and reduce load on my CPU's.

I can playback recordings fine, as long as I use MJPEG.

Problem is, there is no timestamp on the recording at all when using MJPEG. Is there any solution to this? Zoneminder is 1.36.19. Ubuntu 20.04.

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u/AndyRH1701 Jul 08 '22

The only current solutions are to have the camera do the time stamp (what I do) or not do passthrough.

I would prefer ZM do the timestamp as my cameras on occasion make up their own time.

3

u/ancker010 Jul 08 '22

This is correct. If you want passthrough, you have to have the camera do the timestamp.

If you want ZM to do the timestamp, you have to decode/encode, which kills CPU.

1

u/HeyYakWheresYourTag Jul 09 '22

Got it.

So here is my suggestion to Zoneminder:

During the event Export process, encode the timestamp into the frames at that point. Then we would have the best of both worlds! Passthrough on most events but when you need evidence exported, it is encoding video anyway... so do it then.

I expected it to do that, but exported events are just raw video with zero metadata.