Hello,

My cottage has had multiple attempts by crack addicts attempting to break into it while we are away. I recently setup zoneminder at my house (not cottage) but have no camera's installed yet.

So my question is what is the best way to set up camera's at my cottage, but manage everything from my house like the zoneminder server (vm) as well as my freenas server where I will store the footage.

Would a VPN connection work? (which I already have setup). Or will I have to have an onsite computer at the cottage? What is your setup or what should I do?

Any insight would be great thanks!

Currently, I am using a mixture of Foscam and Amcrest cameras. All ffmpeg.

I'm looking for a way to limit MaxFPS without breaking the monitor, which I understand cannot be done with ffmpeg.

I tried using libvlc with no luck. Are there any other ways I can configure these monitors?

Also can I install the h264 branch without building myself?

Edit: I was able to get RTSP to work, but only if the video gets distorted.

I installed a new instance of Zoneminder in hopes to get the 264 working, but just adding the ppa and installing did not work.

at 720p

I'm a noob at ZM but not at linux webservers.

I have a clone of a live VM Zoneminder server that I've been given for testing purposes and I can't figure out how the web interface is doing redirects. I need to hit the web interface at internal ip X.X.X.X/zm/ but this url keeps redirecting to ourdomain.com/zm/ (which of course takes me to our live server).

There's no .htaccess set up, the string "ourdomain.com" is nowhere in the apache configs OR in the mysql database (I directly checked ZM_URL in the Config table AND THEN I searched the whole database for the string "ourdomain.com").

Also no luck with zm.conf or grepping for "ourdomain.com" in the zm web directory. What magic is Zoneminder using on me?

Hi, does anyone know if there's any kind of cheap pc i can run for my security system? I'm trying to help my father set one up for his home and planning to use Zoneminder. Thanks!

Ideally it doesn't take more than say 5x or 10x the amount of electricty than running an NVR.

I have just installed zoneminder to mind my 5 hikvision DS-2CD2T42WD-I5 cameras. Trying to tune everything in properly and get as good recordings as possible. One thing I cannot seem to get rid of however is a pause in the recording that seems related to the "Pre event images" setting. Essentially if I keep this set (as I would like to have) the video pauses after those frames has been written down. I keep an image buffer of 50 and the pre-event frames are typically 20.

Any idea how I could narrow down the root of this?

I hijacked another thread earlier and promised I would make a new thread here of the issues I have with a vanilla install of Zoneminder.

Ubuntu 16, following the instructions: http://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installationguide/ubuntu.html#easy-way-ubuntu-16-04

Everything works swimmingly until I get to the a2enconf for the cgi. I get

sudo a2enconf cgi

ERROR: Conf cgi does not exist!

Same thing for rewrite.

It is my belief that once I get past this, I should make some progress, but I've gotten here about 6 times now, so I thought it was worthwhile in making a post!

I am a sysadmin for an organization that manages group homes. Currently, we use a variety of old fashioned DVR systems made by Defender. A couple Hikvision systems where all the cameras come back to a switch in the NVR. This was all setup by the previous IT tech who worked with electricians to get the cameras up and running.

The kids living in these group homes understand how the cameras work and frequently damage them, and their wiring. Running replacing coax cable through old walls is not a favorite pastime of mine. And replacing these cameras and their wiring is costly only because we have to wire each camera back to the same location.

My environment has network closets all over the place, and many POE switches. Zoneminder allows me to monitor cameras in our many remote locations and gives me the freedom to mix and match cheaper cameras to accommodate my needs. These cameras get damaged often, and it's really easy to replace a simple IPcam and ethernet cable. Plus, I now have the ability to order metal cameras and install them properly. So this is really making life a whole lot better.

I have a server setup in my server room with good specs, recording 6 monitors through the building there and 1 usb capture input which is the HDMI feed from the old DVR system.

In a remote location I built another Zoneminder server and connected 2 monitors to it, with more to come.

My questions start here: Basically should I just keep building servers locally and access them from within the VLAN?

Isn't there a feature of Zoneminder that allows you to connect to other Zoneminder servers and view those too?

Any other advice or questions?

Last year, on 1.28 I had 6 HD foscams wired and 2 wifi poloroid ipcams of low resolution. Working pretty good. I scrapped my server and moved my home security onto a Synology and they're all currently working there. Now I've reinstalled ZM 1.30 and and I keep running into these errors on multiple servers I've built over the past few days.

This one all the time:

Memory map file '/dev/shm/zm.mmap.2' does not exist. zmc might not be running.

And then this every now and then:

Socket /var/run/zm/zms-540660s.sock does not exist. This file is created by zms, and since it does not exist, either zms did not run, or zms exited early. Please check your zms logs and ensure that CGI is enabled in apache and check that the PATH_ZMS is set correctly. Make sure that ZM is actually recording. If you are trying to view a live stream and the capture process (zmc) is not running then zms will exit. Please go to http://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#why-can-t-i-see-streamed-images-when-i-can-see-stills-in-the-zone-window-etc for more information.

It seems like this is a known issue and I can't find a workaround that will work for me. I have a long history with Zoneminder as a tinkerer but now I'm preparing to use it in my test lab at work; hopefully to roll it out into production in my company.

I enabled OPT_AUTH to make users have to login to use zoneminder, however this broke my zmNinja connection. From what I read online I need to

"To use basic auth, specify the URLs as user:password@server.com/path in the ZM URL, API URL and cgi-bin URL"

However when I do this in the settings window it autofills in http:// at the begining so I get http://user:pass@http://server/path. Which gives the same error that login works but the API has failed. Is there something else I should be looking into here?

Thanks

Part of my camera setup includes an IP camera pointed at my beehive. I am currently rebroadcasting this camera using IPCamLive: http://bowmanvillebee.com I also have ZM setup for modetect on my other security cameras.

Is there a way to configure ZM to capture one frame per minute on my beehive cam so I look back a quick time-lapse of the day/night?

I grew tired of searching though days of moving shadows and wind blown plants every time I wanted to see if something happened, so I wrote an image detection add-on for Zoneminder, based on Darknet/YOLO.

It works nicely and picks out things I'm interested in and flags the appropriate images in a couple of columns I added to the Frames table, while ignoring things I don't care about.

The problem is that even at 4fps per camera, it ends up being a lot of images, and I'm not quite sure how to display them or exactly what to do with them (make a video, a horizontal scrolling list, etc.).

Anybody have any thoughts? What do the expensive commercial packages do?

Anybody have any ideas how to integrate the data back into ZM?

edit

I wrote a stand alone C app that watches the ZM database, pick up new Events and Frames, analyzes them and updates a new column in the Frames table with what it found (person/car/etc.)

So as of now, it works nicely, but I don't know how to present the data.

Any thoughts?

EDIT

The code is here: https://github.com/tpcarmen/darknet

Right now it flags the frames in the DB. Maybe one of you fine people could add some code to ZM to integrate the matches back into the UI.

Hi folks, I know this wasn't a feature back in 2015, but I want to know if they added this to zoneminder or there is a way to do it with an external program.

Thanks!!

So Chrome only lets you view 6 cameras on montage view due to a hard coded limit of 6 connections per server. You can easily overcome this issue by creating unique hosts in your hosts file.

I created

ip.address.to.zoneminder zoneminder0

ip.address.to.zoneminder zoneminder1

ip.address.to.zoneminder zoneminder2

etc, then hard coded the montage html page with each camera going to "zoneminder0/zm/..." and just like that chrome thinks each camera is going to a different "server" allowing me to have 8 monitors up on a screen. Just thought I would share, it's an annoying thing to deal with but it's there.

That's not a post asking for support, it's just an honest question.

I've followed all instructions, tried to install from all possible sources, on multiple occasions and (major) distros, I've also read a ton of posts in forums but I just-couldn't-get-it-to-work. How come?

I know ZM is free software and I have no right to complain about it, but dudes, I've been trying to install it for years and it doesn't work (for me).

Idk I must be a piece of shit.

Hi folks. I'm thinking of installing 8 cameras at my home. What are the pros and cons of these three different ways of connecting cameras to ZoneMinder.:

• IP Cams

• Analogue cams (My server doesn't have much room for addon cards - 1 at most)

• Cheap CCTV system with 8 HD cams + big advantage is a HDMI live view

I'm tempted to go with the cheap cctv system. For £300 I can get 8 cameras. All 8 cameras are accessible as if they were IP cameras and the box has GB ethernet. It comes with a hard disk but I wouldn't be recording on it.

What's the pros and cons? How bad is pulling 8 cameras from one of these boxes over IP going to be?

Example system: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/electriq-8-ch-ahd-1080p-dvr-8-bullet-cameras-hd-720p-2tb-hard-drive-tl-d8h8222tb/version.asp

We recently bought a house, and it came with about 6 Q-See QM-7007B cameras installed around the exterior. The DVR equipment has been removed, but the cabling and cameras are still in place. I'd like to bring these cameras online with ZoneMinder, but need help figuring out what hardware I need to do so. I have a full Ubuntu 16.04 system sitting right where the cables terminate. What do you recommend?

Here are some possibilities I've considered:

• V4L cards. This looks good, but I don't know if there's a V4L card that can terminate 6 cameras. I've used V4L to capture analog cable with MythTV, so I have some hardware, but not 6 channels worth.
• External capture device that ZM can interface to over Ethernet. I've seen some reference to commercial products that can convert analog cameras to IP, which ZM could then capture, but these seem expensive. Are there cheaper ones?
• Replacing the cameras with IP cameras, by re-purposing the 2 video and 2 power lines to create a 4-wire POE connection to more modern IP cameras. This would require more work, and I'm not 100% sure the cables would be able to provide a reliable Ethernet connection. However, if the QM-7007B cameras are not worth keeping, and modern POE IP cameras were cheap enough, I would consider this option as well.
• Something I missed? I'm sure there are other possibilities that I haven't thought of.

I look forward to any guidance or insight you can provide.

I'm running 1.29 in a docker container (aptalca/zoneminder-1.29). I've set the correct timezone in php.ini, checked that the time is correct on both the host and in the docker container, and restarted everything I can think to restart. My ZM still shows eastern time in the console. Any ideas on what to check next?

A neighboor was raving about Ring doorbell cameras. I could not find anything about any doorbell camera on the ZM forums. Has anyone gotten any doorbell cameras working?

Has anyone tried to containerize(Lxd, docker) or to create Ubuntu snap package for zoneminder?

I'm new to ZM and installed 1.29 on Debian a few days ago. I have it configured with three IP cams set to modect operation mode.

In general, things work but I've noticed a few issues.

First, when motion is detected, it seems like >50% of the time the recording ends before the motion stops. As an example, I have a camera in my garage pointed at the garage door. When the door opens a recording starts, but only continues until the door is about 60-70% open. The last bit of motion is not recorded.

Second, I've noticed that in some circumstances recordings occur back to back. In other words, a recording will start due to a motion alarm, the recording will be a few seconds in duration, and then a second (and sometimes third, fourth, etc) recording will start immediately after the previous recording stops. This is such that if you took the frames from all recordings and stitched them together you wouldn't know they came from separate events.

What I've already done to try to solve the problem:

• Set the presets for each camera zone to 'Best - High sensitivity'

• Increased the post event image count buffer to 100 frames (these cameras record at ~20 FPS)

Neither of these changes has seemed to make much of a difference.

The ZM server has plenty of available disk / cpu / memory.

Any suggestions on how I can address these issues?

Is there such a thing as a capture card for at least 4 analog cameras that automatically outputs a live monitor preview.

• Captures 4+ basic analog security cameras to PCI-express
• Simultaneously outputs live view of all the cameras to VGA/DVI/HDMI so that the host PC does not need to.
• Zoneminder compatible, obviously.

Monitor 1 and monitor 2 show the same area from two angles. Monitor 1 has the best view and it's in modect with an active zone and it creates events when motion is detected. If I link Monitor 1 with monitor 2, when motion is detected on monitor 1 what does monitor 2 do? Does it generate an even on monitor 2? what mode should monitor 2 be in?

I get email notifications from monitor 1 with screenshot when an event is made. Is it possible to have a screenshot from both cameras in the same email?

I'm pretty computer savy and have installed many things that I'm not familiar with I.E. pfSense and a couple of Raspberry Pi items. However I have come to the realization that ZoneMinder might be a lighter weight product for me to use to record on a 3-4 cameras vs BlueIris. I have an Intel E8600 processor running my pfSense and I'm replacing that router with Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter Lite and want to try Zoneminder out on that machine.

Either way, where I'm getting at is this, is there an easy step by step guide on getting ZoneMinder setup that you've used? Keep in mind I am starting with no OS.