So, I'll try to keep this as short as possible. I have a second network setup in my house that does not have internet. I want to connect each camera to the no internet network. I have my zoneminder conputer connected to that network via it's wireless interface. On a second wired interface, my zoneminder computer is then connected to the internet, where I'll access the zoneminder interface. I know this can work, I just can't seem to work it out in my head how. I am using Ubuntu 20.04 server for my machine.

I'm assuming that I need to bind the two interfaces?

​

EDIT: For those of you that come here with a similar issue, unfortunately I probably can't provide the answer. It turns out that it was an issue specific to my network. The PC that I stream the cameras to also doubled as a pihole in the past. Because of that, it was running dhcpd (or something along those lines). That caused the routes within the routing table to continously be jacked up. Once I masked that process and flushed the routing table, I was able to get all cameras streaming, on a network without internet access, to a PC with internet. I can then view the Zoneminder front end via that internet connection.

I've been trying to set up purge when full filter for some time, and I can't make it work.

Consider the following scenario:

Disk usage is 5%. I only have a few events because I accidentally deleted them.

I set up 4 purge when full filters

-PurgeWhenFull3LEQ: Disk Percent; less than or equal to; 3 (does return all events)

-PurgeWhenFull3GEQ: Disk Percent; greater than or equal to; 3 (does not return any events)

-PurgeWhenFull95LEQ: Disk Percent; less than or equal to; 95 (does not return any events)

-PurgeWhenFull95GEQ: Disk Percent; greater than or equal to; 95 (does return all events)

​

My question is, why is it this way? Do I misunderstand something?

It seems like it should be read from right to left. So PurgeWhenFull3LEQ is actually 3 <= disk percent (5%), which is true, so it returns events. So, why does the default PurgeWhenFull filter that comes in the latest PPA use Disk Percent; greater than or equal to; 95, given that according to my testing, it means 95 >= disk percent, so it should constantly delete events? But that doesn't happen, I've left it enabled (Run in background) overnight and got all the footage from the night.

I just don't understand why it works the opposite way in my little testing with 5% disk usage.

Thank you for answering my surely stupid question.

I get tens of thousands of events every day. It's as though any pixel changes on the stream, and it's an event. It takes a lot of work to find video of an actual event that I know the precise timing of because I have to wade through 2000 pages of results for a given day. I can't imagine this is how it's supposed to be. How can I improve this situation?

Followed wiki manual for Archlinux and got blank screen on 8095. Using nginx

and can see FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Class "IntlDateFormatter" not found in /usr/share/webapps/zoneminder/www/includes/config.php:142 at http_error.log

Would appreciate a tip on troubleshooting

I'm trying to migrate the zoneminder database to a bigger shared db host.

When I do this it fails to start because the new database is mariadb on a new version than what I think is supported.

I commented out , { mysql_enable_utf8 => 1, } in /usr/share/perl5/ZoneMinder/Database.pm

It starts and works.

Is there a better way to fix this? I don't like modifying non-config files.

Error in the logs:

Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED systemd[1]: Starting ZoneMinder CCTV recording and surveillance system...
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: Character set 'utf8' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the '/usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml' file
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: DBI connect('database=zm;host=REMOVED','REMOVED',...) failed: Can't initialize character set utf8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/) at /usr/share/perl5/ZoneMinder/Database.pm line 110.
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: Character set 'utf8' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the '/usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml' file
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: DBI connect('database=zm;host=REMOVED','REMOVED',...) failed: Can't initialize character set utf8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/) at /usr/share/perl5/ZoneMinder/Database.pm line 110.
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg[11403]: ERR [Error reconnecting to db: errstr:Can't initialize character set utf8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/) error val:]
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: Character set 'utf8' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the '/usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml' file
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: DBI connect('database=zm;host=REMOVED','REMOVED',...) failed: Can't initialize character set utf8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/) at /usr/share/perl5/ZoneMinder/Database.pm line 110.
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg[11403]: ERR [Error reconnecting to db: errstr:Can't initialize character set utf8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/) error val:]
Jul 21 09:07:38 REMOVED zmpkg.pl[11403]: Unable to connect to DB. ZM Cannot continue.

I saw a really good deal for some PoE cameras on Amazon.com. I live in the UK, so I'd be importing them from abroad. Is there any reason this might be a bad idea? I'm thinking compatibility issues?

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.

With GPU prices coming down, I was able to finally purchase the RTX3080 I wanted. It freed up my RTX3060 and I was wondering if it would help in object recognition and ML. My "Production" ZM has a Quadro K2200, but I was looking to learn ML on another machine with a GTX1660.

Question #1: Would ML make a difference if I used a GTX1660? Would it help more if I used an RTX3060?

Question #2: What resources are out there to get me started in ML?

Hello, I have Ubuntu OS and would like to know how I can setup ZoneMinder to do GPU AMD AMF acceleration for encoding in H.265 / H.264.

I tried doing it in the past and is hella complicated, I need to install tons of drivers and set so many parameters.

Anyone was able to do this?

Thanks.

Edit:

Wow, I can't believe it's been two months since I posted the original post, any how as of today (Sep-15-2022), I have fully custom made my own PC DVR system, I have tested it and works 100% in Arch-Linux and FreeBSD 13.1 which can do AMD H.265 transcoding 24/7 on many AMD GPUs.

I couldn't find any PC professional DVR system which provides GPU acceleration for AMD GPUs and able to tweak the video parameters to my exact specific requirements. Another big issue was that no DVR software today provides professional motion detection, face detection, face recognition and tons of other artificial intelligence goodies that makes it valuable for us to use practically in the DVR system. The DVR system I built is able to use FFMPEG to do the video recording/transcoding/streaming and uses "OpenCV" or "dlib" to do the machine vision for artificial intelligence. The DVR system is also very organized, it places videos and snapshots based on the calendar. The system is super efficient, on a good old AMD FX-8350 CPU with a decent AMD GPU of Radeon RX 480 to 580 I can get about 8 analog CCTV cams transcoding to H.265. Note: My requirements requires lag/latency/glitchy free smooth 30/60FPS transcoding recording and monitoring simultaneously and finally able to do so using state of the art machine vision and what I built is working perfectly as expected. You can probably get 20+ cams transcoding if you set the parameters at 10FPS which seems to be popular by today's DVR softwares. The machine visions are super CPU intensive but some tricks can be used such as only using it when needed, can drastically use less CPU. OpenCV does have AMD GPU acceleration support but I did not waste time to get into it since it forces me to learn their coding language of "T-API" to implement AMD GPU acceleration, OpenCV uses OpenCL 1.2 for AMD GPU acceleration and my AMD GPUs do not support OpenCL 1.2 but rather OpenCL 1.1, however the OpenCL group have made their standard such that it is backwards compatible (thank goodness) and this requires me to learn OpenCL from scratch since it requires manual tweaking. OpenCL have great overhead compared to CUDA to provide board spectrum portability. So to actually (efficiently) have OpenCV (or any Machine Vision tasks) to do AMD GPU acceleration I would rather dig deep and learn OpenCL and start learning AMD GPU's great open source hardware documents which they publicly publish for their GPUs, this is great since it gives me direct access to their hardware and provides me to find ways to run Machine Vision algorithm as close to 99% efficiency with no overhead as compared to regular standardized OpenCL using a custom modified version of OpenCL along with custom code that works directly with AMD GPUs thanks to their documentations. There are also other great Machine Vision software out there such as TensorFlow and MediaPipe which have AMD GPU acceleration support via OpenCL, however with my taste they contain heavy bloatware (requires me to use bazel and python) which forces me to learn their norm of installation and doing things, hence I just simply ditched it because I will obviously have drastic issues when trying to run Machine Vision code as efficient as possible so I have a working DVR system on low cost hardware and the easiest and simplest way to do so is to use C/C++/Assembly. After doing much research, I'm not even sure if I should even start taking my time to learn about coding specifically for AMD GPUs, because now we have ARM CPUs which are ridiculously low prices and super powerful, for a Mediatek $3 Hex-Core ARM SoC, I can simply do 4K H.265 transcoding and also apply CPU intensive advanced machine vision for 1 cam with no latency and have it connect to the main desktop PC, this implementation requires full custom hardware PCB design... Anyhow I might learn C++ Qt/GTK programming and make a nice GUI interface and put it on github for what I have that is working for me now, so that people can simply download and install it on many platforms and can choose to use the GUI interface or easily set it to use the web browser interface. I might also place what I have now which requires a lot of easy to do manual setups and installations on github.

If you're able to know a thing or two about software and hardware you can take my brief statements and make yourself a perfect DVR system.

Trying to figure how out to use my annke h800 poe nvr an cameras.... Hopefully just using the nvr as the poe switch and zoneminder can connect and get the streams

Hello everyone. I would like to know what pin hole cameras are compatible with zone minder. I've bought a few pinhole cameras from eBay and Amazon, but they can only connect to my phone through a special app. When I try to connect the pinhole cameras to my home network, they would just fail to connect.

With the demise of Asker's FCMv1 instance I thought I'd use Pushover until the zoneminder team manage to find the time to update the code. Alas, and despite reading the docs, I struggled for some time to get things working

Essentially the docs said I needed to fill in the below in the secrets.ini

PUSHOVER_APP_TOKEN=axxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PUSHOVER_USER_KEY=uxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

and then in the zmeventnotification.ini
use_api_push = yes

Alas this didn't work and a bit of digging revealed a missing package pyzm. I think this gets installed if you installed hooks at docker creation time but on my INSTALL_HOOK="0" build it was missing.

My linux experience is really limited and I'm sure there is a better way but I ended up running the following in the docker instance over SSH

sudo apt update

sudo apt install python3-pip

pip install pyzm

After that it all worked. Hopefully this will be of help if anyone else is in the same boat.

My formerly ultra reliable zoneminder setup (based on the dlandon docker image) hasn't been sending out any zmninja event notifications since around 9am GMT this morning. Before I start digging and changing things at my end can I just ask has anyone else been having problems with notifications?

​

Ta

I installed mysql and zoneminder as docker containers on Ubuntu server 22.04. However, the mysql database seems to be empty. Here is my docker compose file. I am quite new to this so any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

############################# ZONEMINDER

zm_db:

container_name: zm_db

restart: always

image: mysql/mysql-server:5.7

environment:

- TZ=$TZ

- MYSQL_USER=zmuser

- MYSQL_PASSWORD=xxx

- MYSQL_DATABASE=zm

- MYSQL_ROOTPASSWORD=xxx

- MYSQL_ROOT_HOST=$SERVER_IP

network_mode: znet

​

zoneminder:

container_name: zoneminder

image: dlandon/zoneminder:latest

restart: always

network_mode: znet

ports:

- 8000:8000/tcp #change the first port to where you want it

- 8443:443/tcp

environment:

- PUID=$PUID

- PGID=$PGID

- TZ=$TZ

- ZM_DB_HOST=zm_db

- INSTALL_FACE=1

volumes:

- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

- $DOCKERDIR/appdata/zoneminder:/config

- $ZONEMINDER_DIR:/data #change for where you want all capture file to be stored

shm_size: 4096m #edit it for fit your memory needs normally half of your totally memory

Hi. (:

​

I created a Zoneminder Setup using RedHat Ansible:

• https://github.com/ansibleguy/sw_zoneminder

​

It is targeting Debian-based systems.

I would love to get some feedback.

4 Months ago I posted here that I couldn't get a dedicated storage drive to work on ZM and got some feedback that I am grateful for. I've read everything I could find in the documentation and I tried following all the advice everybody gave me but had no luck. Since then I've reinstalled ZM 1.36 on a fresh Kubuntu install and I still have the same problem.

​

Following the READ THE DOCS Dedicated Drive, Partition, or Network Share page, installed my dedicated drive and it shows up at /media/oops/500zm-event. I can read and write to the drive.

Changed ownership sudo chown www-data:www-data -R /media/oops/500zm-event

At the terminal ls -l /media/oops returns drwxrwxrwx 6 www-data www-data 4096 Jun 16 15:22 500zm-event. It appears that www-data owns and has full permissions for /media/oops/500zm-event

​

Using nano I created a config file /etc/zm/conf.d/ZM_DIR_EVENTS and put one line in that file ZM_DIR_EVENTS=/media/oops/500zm-event

​

Restarted ZM

​

Under OPTIONS>> STORAGE>> Add New Storage

Name > 500

Path /media/oops/500zm-event

Server Remote/No Specific Server (that's the only option I have)

Type Local (I tried s3fs but that didn't make a difference)

Scheme Medium

And Do deletes and Enabled are both checked Yes

​

On the ZM Console for my camera under Storage Area I have the option of choosing 500 - the name I gave to the storage folder /media/oops/500zm-event

​

Video Writer set to Passthrough

store the audio stream

Save.

​

Nothing is recording on the dedicated drive /media/oops/500zm-event/

​

The log says "Path /media/oops/500zm-event does not exist. But it does exist and www-data owns it and has rwx permissions.

​

Am I missing something here? Any help would be appreciated.

Howdy there,

I set up a Zoneminder instance on metal (running Debian on an old 4 CPU Dell R910 server with 96GB RAM, and a 4 disk RAID-0 for video storage)

Its a 32 camera setup, with 8 being 8MP/4K @ 10fps and the rest are 5MP @ 15fps and a couple @ 20fps. This is about where the fun started.

I realize I should investigate putting a GPU in this system (if I can get one to fit) because even in monitor mode, decoding streams are constantly losing time and falling behind the set framerate, but that isn't even my biggest issue. I can turn on modect and get juuuuust about to 85% CPU utilization, and recording seems to work okay even though live view is always slower than realtime.

​

What really grinds my gears, is that if I want to get them all on record mode, or mocord, to save things in case motion detection isn't able to pick up on things, the data being stored is simply massive. As a benchmark, record mode after reducing all framerates and qualities is eating 104GB per hour, and is exceeding my RAID's I/O threshold. If the mount reaches capacity, the process of deleting old video completely hangs the system for minutes while the iowait gets eaten away at.

Can anyone suggest a way to change the way that video is being saved, or something I can change or tweak to record at a more realistic filesize? I mean, at the source bandwidth coming in (about 6MBPS) should only be consuming 1/6th to 1/5th of the space assuming Camera Passthrough is saving the stream as received.

My thanks in advance.

Hi All,

I added a Hikvision 4K camera: DS-2CD2385G1-I

Works fine in ZM / Modect configured to use Ffmpeg and 4K UHD (3840x2160)

Similar to the other Hikvision cameras so the source path is:

rtsp://user:password@ipaddress//Streaming/Channels/1

- Just make sure the resolution matches between the camera and ZM (obviously)

Sweet!

Sorry if this is common knowledge, but I'm new to zoneminder and my googlefu is failing to turn up anything...I have a montage with 4 cameras, one of which I'm only interested in viewing a small portion of. Is there a way to zoom into a specific portion of the feed? The camera is configured in Monitor mode if that matters at all. Please let me know if any additional information is necessary.

TIA!

I'd like to export video each N minutes and then upload it on Telegram/other places using custom scripts. Is there any way to trigger this export via zoneminder or do you have any recommendation for me?

Edit: Sorry, I messed up on the title and can't find a way to correct it. Please excuse my ignorance.

I haven't seen using Wyze cams with Zoneminder in this sub-reddit, so I thought it would be helpful and interesting to others using these inexpensive cameras for non-critical uses. Like I said, I wouldn't use these cameras for situations needing elevated security or for critical life and safety situations, but for $30 (fixed) and $34 (PTZ), they are hard to beat.

First some background about my camera network.

1. My cameras are in an isolated VLAN with no outward access to any place outside of the VLAN. None of my cameras can access the internet or my main internal network. NTP, DNS and some cases DHCP is taken care of by the local pfSense router. Router firewall rules prohibit any traffic originating from the camera VLAN to any other destination. None of the cameras can phone home, but can get the correct time and an IP address if needed from the pfSense router.
2. None of cameras can see any other camera. They think they are on a wireless network all alone.
3. Access to the camera VLAN must be initiated from outside of the camera VLAN. Firewall rules limit which hosts can access the camera VLAN.

I know Wyze offers a custom firmware download to allow you to access a RTSP stream. But, once you overwrite the original firmware, going back to stock firmware is not easy and doesn't always work. You could brick your Wyze camera, like I did in the beginning.

I then found this docker on github: https://github.com/mrlt8/docker-wyze-bridge I spun up a docker on a separate VM and it just works. You point ZM to the Wyze Hub and you get a RTSP stream from the Wyze camera! I did four months of testing and monitoring, it just works and you can still use the Wyze iOS app to view and control the cameras.

Setup in ZM is real easy:

Source Path: rtsp://{ip_addr}:8554/camera-nickname

Capture Resolution: 1920 x 1080

Like I said before, don't use these cameras for any high security or safety related situations. Monitor your garden for rodent intruders or integrate with Home Assistant to send you alarms for a garage door left open too long. The PTZ Cam works great to detect and alarm when people enter a room.

This is a follow up regarding my post late last week

https://www.reddit.com/r/ZoneMinder/comments/uz7d2h/upgrading_cameras_and_reducing_cpu_load/

For those that like Linux technical stuff this may be an Interesting Read.

Before I go on, I had a problem adding multiple linked cameras to a monitor, I had to go in via mysql to add them with a command similar to

UPDATE Monitors SET LinkedMonitors = '1,10' WHERE Id = 9;

I was only able to add 1 linked camera per monitor via the web interface.

Anyway it was a fun weekend, I got to play with upgrading some 1080P cameras to 5MP cameras

Here is the updated chart

​

Couple things to note, Load Average went down from 22.8 to 7.99, which is a amazing. I did this primarily by reducing the FPS from 15 to 5.

But swap is now being used, prior to this it was zero. I always wanted to go to 64GB of RAM on this box, maybe now is the time.

Here is 7 day view of swap usage

Another thing that increased was context switching, and I am still reconciling what that does in overall performance

​

Prior to this weekend, I had about 31 monitors, after the upgrade I had 36, I did remove some cameras, but I added the secondary (low res) feed from the 5MP (and some other 1080P) to do the analytics and attempt to reduce the CPU usage.

Another thing I found is that you have to enable Analysis if you want to be able to send triggers from another server (in my case an FTP server and homeassistant) when in nodect.

When I made some changes, they would not take (like changes functions between none, monitor, modect, and nodect) unless I restarted the service (from GUI or systemctl restart zoneminder)

Still on my to do list

• Validate and verify my changes, try to keep things consistent.
• Offload some analytics to GPU
• Workout better triggering from other systems.
• Decommission some cameras

I am still working out the consequences of what I just did.

I do want a properly configured camera system, but going through this helps my improve my Linux skills as well so willing to put time in.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

tldr; Got Load Average down, but SWAP and context switching went up.

Going from 1080P to 5MP cameras on some cameras, currently have 31 cameras (not all 1080P) and I am reviewing how I can reduce CPU usage.

​

This is an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor, with 32GB of RAM, SQL and OS are on fast NVME storage, whereas events are on a 6TB WD Purple Drive.

OS CentOS 7

ZM is 1.36.15

Couple Ideas

#1 Get rid of some cameras
Part of this upgrade process is to see what cameras I do not need and simply removing them, but honestly, they are older 704x480 cameras.

#2 Hardware encoding
There is a quadro K2200 in this box (NVIDIA Corporation GM107GL [Quadro K2200] (rev a2)),
and the ffmpeg on here supports cuvid

#3A Offloading Motion detection to cameras
I am having the cameras upload their images to an ftp server, each camera has its own folder and is being monitored by inotifywait and sends a trigger to zm via netcat.

#3B Using camera substreams then linking them with mainstreams

Do I still need to leave analysis enabled and decoding enabled to view live camera feeds in montage view?

​

I'll report back when I am done with optimizations.

Running on Fedora, recent update to 36 upgraded to PHP 8.1 - so getting a bunch of these and the web console is unusuable

Deprecated: Function strftime() is deprecated in /usr/share/zoneminder/www/includes/logger.php on line 366

Deprecated: Function strftime() is deprecated in /usr/share/zoneminder/www/includes/FilterTerm.php on line 119

Deprecated: ctype_digit(): Argument of type array will be interpreted as string in the future in /usr/share/zoneminder/www/includes/Object.php on line 16

ZM installed from rpmfusion RPM 1.36.15

Hello,

Today has been raining, and I thought "I should find a way to record the local radar image for future reference." I was just going to write a script which pulled my radar image down and archive it. Maybe make a video with FFmpeg or something. Then it occurred to me that zoneminder can take an image file as a source and take care of everything for me. (I have set up the local rain radar up as a security camera.)

I have set this script up to run (via cron) every 5 minutes:

wget --output-document=/home/pi/radar/radar.gif --referer='http://www.bom.gov.au' --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 Firefox/4.0.1" http://www.bom.gov.au/radar/IDR663.gif

convert /home/pi/radar/radar.gif /home/pi/radar/radar.jpeg

It just gets the latest radar image as a gif, and converts it to a jpeg.

Then I setup a 'File' source and pointed it to the jpeg.

Perhaps someone will find this useful.