will display a live feed from monitor id 1, scaled down by 50% in quality and resized to 640x480px.
* This assumes ``/zm/cgi-bin`` is your CGI_BIN path. Change it to what is correct in your system
* The "auth" token you see above is required if you use ZoneMinder authentication. To understand how to get the auth token, please read the "Login, Logout & API security" section below.
* The "connkey" parameter is essentially a random number which uniquely identifies a stream. If you don't specify a connkey, ZM will generate its own. It is recommended to generate a connkey because you can then use it to "control" the stream (pause/resume etc.)
* Instead of dealing with the "auth" token, you can also use ``&user=username&pass=password`` where "username" and "password" are your ZoneMinder username and password respectively. Note that this is not recommended because you are transmitting them in a URL and even if you use HTTPS, they may show up in web server logs.
PTZ on live streams
-------------------
PTZ commands are pretty cryptic in ZoneMinder. This is not meant to be an exhaustive guide, but just something to whet your appetite:
Lets assume you have a monitor, with ID=6. Let's further assume you want to pan it left.
You'd need to send a:
``POST`` command to ``https://yourserver/zm/index.php`` with the following data payload in the command (NOT in the URL)
Obviously, if you are using authentication, you need to be logged in for this to work.
Like I said, at this stage, this is only meant to get you started. Explore the ZoneMinder code and use "Inspect source" as you use PTZ commands in the ZoneMinder source code.
`control_functions.php <https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zoneminder/blob/10531df54312f52f0f32adec3d4720c063897b62/web/skins/classic/includes/control_functions.php>`__ is a great place to start.
* This assumes ``/zm/cgi-bin`` is your CGI_BIN path. Change it to what is correct in your system
* This will playback event 293820, starting from frame 1 as an MJPEG stream
* Like before, you can add more parameters like ``scale`` etc.
* auth and connkey have the same meaning as before, and yes, you can replace auth by ``&user=usename&pass=password`` as before and the same security concerns cited above apply.
If instead, you have chosen to use the MP4 (Video) storage mode for events, you can directly play back the saved video file:
The best way to answer this question is to play with ZoneMinder console. Open a browser, play back live or recorded feed, and do an "Inspect Source" to see what parameters
As you might have seen above, there are two ways to login, one that uses the `login.json` API and the other that logs in using the ZM portal. If you are running ZoneMinder 1.32.0 and above, it is *strongly* recommended you use the `login.json` approach. The "old" approach will still work but is not as powerful as the API based login. Here are the reasons why:
* The "old" approach basically uses the same login webpage (`index.php`) that a user would log into when viewing the ZM console. This is not really using an API and more importantly, if you have additional components like reCAPTCHA enabled, this will not work. Using the API approach is much cleaner and will work irrespective of reCAPTCHA
* The new login API returns important information that you can use to stream videos as well, right after login. Consider for example, a typical response to the login API (`/login.json`):
Where `authval` is the credentials returned to start streaming videos.
The `append_password` field will contain 1 when it is necessary for you to append your ZM password. This is the case when you set `AUTH_RELAY` in ZM options to "plain", for example. In that case, the `credentials` field may contain something like `&user=admin&pass=` and you have to add your password to that string.
..NOTE:: It is recommended you invoke the `login` API once every 60 minutes to make sure the session stays alive. The same is true if you use the old login method too.
It is worthwhile to note that starting ZM 1.32.3 and beyond, this API also returns a ``Monitor_Status`` object per monitor. It looks like this:
::
"Monitor_Status": {
"MonitorId": "2",
"Status": "Connected",
"CaptureFPS": "1.67",
"AnalysisFPS": "1.67",
"CaptureBandwidth": "52095"
}
If you don't see this in your API, you are running an older version of ZM. This gives you a very convenient way to check monitor status without calling the ``daemonCheck`` API described later.
The edit function of the Configs API is a little quirky at the moment. Its format deviates from the usual edit flow of other APIs. This will be fixed, eventually. For now, to change the "Value" of ZM_X10_HOUSE_CODE from A to B:
PTZ controls associated with a monitor are stored in the Controls table and not the Monitors table inside ZM. What that means is when you get the details of a Monitor, you will only know if it is controllable (isControllable:true) and the control ID.
To be able to retrieve PTZ information related to that Control ID, you need to use the controls API
Note that these APIs only retrieve control data related to PTZ. They don't actually move the camera. See the "PTZ on live streams" section to move the camera.
# The API below uses "du" to calculate disk space. We no longer recommend you use it if you have many events. Use the Storage APIs instead, described later
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/host/getDiskPercent.json # returns in GB (not percentage), disk usage per monitor (that is,space taken to store various event related information,images etc. per monitor)
Storage and Server APIs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
ZoneMinder introduced many new options that allowed you to configure multiserver/multistorage configurations. While a part of this was available in previous versions, a lot of rework was done as part of ZM 1.31 and 1.32. As part of that work, a lot of new and useful APIs were added. Some of these are part of ZM 1.32 and others will be part of ZM 1.32.3 (of course, if you build from master, you can access them right away, or wait till a stable release is out.
This returns storage data for my single server install. If you are using multi-storage, you'll see many such "Storage" entries, one for each storage defined:
::
curl http://server/zm/api/storage.json
Returns:
::
{
"storage": [
{
"Storage": {
"Id": "0",
"Path": "\/var\/cache\/zoneminder\/events",
"Name": "Default",
"Type": "local",
"Url": null,
"DiskSpace": "364705447651",
"Scheme": "Medium",
"ServerId": null,
"DoDelete": true
}
}
]
}
"DiskSpace" is the disk used in bytes. While this doesn't return disk space data as rich as ``/host/getDiskPercent``, it is much more efficient.
As described earlier, treat this document as an "introduction" to the important parts of the API and streaming interfaces.
There are several details that haven't yet been documented. Till they are, here are some resources:
* zmNinja, the open source mobile app for ZoneMinder is 100% based on ZM APIs. Explore its `source code <https://github.com/pliablepixels/zmNinja>`__ to see how things work.
* Launch up ZM console in a browser, and do an "Inspect source". See how images are being rendered. Go to the networks tab of the inspect source console and look at network requests that are made when you pause/play/forward streams.
* If you still can't find an answer, post your question in the `forums <https://forums.zoneminder.com/index.php>`__ (not the github repo).
