zoneminder/README

ZONE MINDER v0.9.11
===================

Introduction
============

Welcome to ZoneMinder, the new all-in-one Linux GPL'd security camera solution. 
A few months back my garage was burgled and all my wine and power tools were 
nicked! I realised shortly after that if I'd just had a camera overlooking the 
door then at least I'd have know exactly when and who did the dirty deed. And so 
ZoneMinder was born. It's still a baby but hopefully it can grow up to be 
something that can be genuinely useful and maybe one day either prevent similar 
incidents or perhaps bring some perpetrators to justice.

ZoneMinder is designed around a series of independent components that only 
function when necessary limiting any wasted resource and maximising the 
efficiency of your machine. A fairly ancient Pentium PC should be able to track 
one camera per device at up to 25 frames per second with this dropping by half 
approximately for each additional camera on the same device. Additional cameras 
on other devices do not interact so can maintain this frame rate. Even 
monitoring several cameras still will not overload the CPU as frame processing 
is designed to synchronise with capture and not stall it.

As well as being fast ZoneMinder is designed to be friendly and even more than 
that, actually useful. As well as the fast video interface core it also comes 
with a user friendly and comprehensive PHP based web interface allowing you to 
control and monitor your cameras from home or even at work or on the road. It 
supports variable web capabilities based on available bandwidth. The web 
interface also allows you to view events that your cameras have captured and 
archive them or review them time and again, or delete the ones you no longer 
wish to keep. The web pages directly interact with the core daemons ensuring 
full co-operation at all times. ZoneMinder can even be installed as a system 
service ensuring it is right there if your computer has to reboot for any 
reason.

The core of ZoneMinder is the capture and analysis of images and there is a 
highly configurable set of parameters that allow you to ensure that you can 
eliminate false positives whilst ensuring that anything you don't want to miss 
will be captured and saved. ZoneMinder allows you to define a set of 'zones' for 
each camera of varying sensitivity and functionality. This allows you to 
eliminate regions that you don't wish to track or define areas that will alarm 
if various thresholds are exceeded in conjunction with other zones.

ZoneMinder is fresh off the keyboard and so comes with no warranty whatsoever, 
please try it, send your feedback and if you get anything useful out of it 
please let me know.


Requirements
============

ZoneMinder needs a couple of things to work. Firstly, it uses MySQL so you'll 
need that. In order to compile you need to make sure you have a development 
installation and not just a runtime, this is because it needs to use the MySQL 
header files. Next it does things with JPEGs so you'll need at least libjpeg.a 
which I think come as standard nowadays with most distributions. It also uses 
the netpbm utilities in a very limited way to generate thumbnails under certain 
circumstances though this can be modified. ZoneMinder can generate MPEG videos 
if necessary, for this you'll need the Berkeley MPEG encoder, if you don't have 
it don't worry the options will be hidden and you'll not miss much really. The 
web interface uses PHP and so you need that in your apache or other web server 
as well. There are also various perl modules that you may need that vary 
depending on which options you choose on installation.

Finally, there is quite a bit of image streaming in the package so if you don't 
have Netscape or other browser that supports image streaming natively I 
recommend you get the excellent Cambozola java applet from 
http://www.charliemouse.com/code/cambozola/ which will let you view the image 
stream in Internet Explorer and others. Otherwise you're limited to just 
refreshing still images. See note about which version to get in Troubleshooting 
section though.

Hardware-wise, ZoneMinder has been used with BTTV cards and USB cameras with the 
V4L interface. I don't have a lot of cameras so I've not had change to test it 
much. There will soon be a list of devices that are definitely known to work on 
the web site. Please let me know if your camera works or not. You do need to 
have Video 4 Linux installed. I've not got many machines so I've only really 
used it on RedHat, which does have everything there by default I think. 
Slackware does need a bit more tinkering than other distributions, there will be 
document on the web site describing what users have had to do to get it working 
with very soon, though I can email additional information if requested. Please 
give me feedback on other distributions.


Building
========

The first thing you need to do is run the included configure script to define 
some initial configuration, just type

./configure --with-mysql=<your MySQL root> --with-webdir=<your web directory> --
with-cgidir=<your cgi directory>

where --with-mysql identifies where you have installed MySQL (usually /usr), --
with-webdir is the directory to which you want to install the PHP files, and --
with-cgidir is the directory to which you want to install CGI files. These 
directories could be /var/www/html/zm and /var/www/cgi-bin for example. There 
are also two further arguments you can add if your web user and group are not 
both 'apache'. These are --with-webuser and --with-webgroup. Type

./configure -help

for details.

That's the build configuration sorted out. The next thing you have to do is do a 
little more runtime specific configuration. ZoneMinder config is scattered 
around various files in the distribution so to make things easier for you there 
is a ZoneMinder configuration utility included. Type

perl ./zmconfig.pl

to get it started. It is an interactive utility and will prompt you by asked you 
various questions. For most questions typing '?' will give you additional help 
if you need it. Once you've answered all the questions it will write out a 
configuration file called 'zmconfig.txt' and then process various files to 
substitute the information in them. If you run it again it will remember your 
answers from before by reading 'zmconfig.txt' before it starts. You can also 
edit this file directly to change values. If you do you can run zmconfig in non-
interactive mode by typing

perl ./zmconfig.pl -noi

which will just read your file and do the substations with no questions asked. 
Also if you are upgrading from version 0.9.7 (or later) you can copy your old 
zmconfig*.txt files into the current build directory before you run zmconfig.pl 
and it will use your preferences as a basis for generating the new ones.

If you get errors such as 'Can't locate Term::ReadKey.pm' when trying to run 
zmconfig.pl then this module is missing from your system. See the 
troubleshooting section for details of how to install it.

Among the first questions zmconfig.pl asks you are to do with the database and 
the next thing you should do is create it and the associated database users. You 
may notice that there are two sets of users and passwords. This is because the 
streaming server and utility binaries require only read access to the database 
so you may wish to create both a full access user and a limited access user. You 
can of course set both to the full access user. The included schema 
(zmschema.sql) can be used to actually create the tables required. The database 
is usually called just 'zm'.

If you are upgrading from a previous version you can use zmalter-x.y.z.sql to 
upgrade your database and make the necessary changes where x.y.z identifies the 
version of ZoneMinder you had installed previously. So if you are going from 
version 0.9.7 to version 0.9.11 you would run the scripts for all intervening 
versions to get to the current one. For a new installation the simplest way to 
create your database and users is as follows,

mysql mysql < zmschema.sql
mysql mysql
grant select,insert,update,delete on <your database name>.* to '<your first 
username>' identified by '<your first password>';
grant select on <your database name>.* to '<your second username>' identified by 
'<your second password>'
quit
mysqladmin reload

You may need to supply a username and password to the mysql commands in the 
first place to give yourself sufficient privileges to perform the required 
commands.

Then just type 'make' and off you go.


Installation
============

Once the build has completed you should have several shiny new binaries. I will 
now briefly describe what each of them do.

zmc - This is the ZoneMinder Capture daemon. This binary's job is to sit on a 
video device and suck frames off it as fast as possible. These are written to a 
shared memory ring buffer and should run at more or less constant speed.

zma - This is the ZoneMinder Analysis daemon. This is the component that goes 
through the captured frames and checks them for alarming events. It generally 
keeps up with the zmc but if very busy may skip some frames to prevent it 
falling behind. The algorithm it uses to decide what to skip and when is 
configurable.

zmf - New in version 0.9.11 is the ZoneMinder Frame daemon. Its sole purpose in 
life is to work in conjunction with a zma daemon and wait for alarm frames to be 
sent to it, which it will then write to disk. This allows zma to get on with the 
more important business of checking the images. Use of zmf is not compulsory and 
ZoneMinder will work perfectly well without it if so configured.

zms - This is the ZoneMinder Streaming server. The web interface connects with 
this to get real-time or historical streamed images.

zmu - This is the ZoneMinder Utility. It's basically a handy command line 
interface to several useful functions. Not really meant to be used by anyone 
except the web page (there's only limited 'help' in it so far) but can be if 
necessary, especially for debugging video problems.

zmfix - This is a small binary that exists only to ensure that the video device 
files can be read by the main capture daemons. It is often the case that these 
device files are set to be accessible by root only on boot. This binary runs 
setuid and ensures that they have appropriate permissions. This is not a daemon 
and runs only on system start and then exits.

As well as this there are the web PHP files in the web directory and some perl 
scripts in the scripts directory, only one of which may actually be used in a 
minimal installation. These scripts all have some configuration at the top of 
the files which should be viewed and amended if necessary and are as follows.

zmpkg.pl - This is the ZoneMinder Package Control script. This is used by the 
web interface and service scripts to control the execution of the system as a 
whole.

zmdc.pl - This is the ZoneMinder Daemon Control script. This is used by the web 
interface and the zmpkg.pl script to control and maintain the execution of the 
capture and analysis daemons amongst others. You should not need to run this 
script yourself.

zmfilter.pl - This script controsl the execution of saved filters and will be      
started and stopped by the web interface based on whether there are filters that 
have been defined to be autonomous. This script is also responsible for the 
automatic uploading of events to a 3rd party server.

zmaudit.pl - This script is used to check the consistency of the event file 
system and database. It can delete orphaned events, i.e. ones that appear in one 
location and not the other as well as checking that all the various event 
related tables are in line. It can be run interactively or in batch mode either 
from the command line or a cron job or similar. In the zmconfig.pl there is an 
option to specify fast event deletes where the web interface only deletes the 
event entry from the database itself. If this is set then it is this script that 
tidies up the rest.

zmx10.pl - This is an option script that can be used to initiate and monitor X10 
Home Automation style events and interface with an alarm system either by the 
generation of X10 signals on ZoneMinder events or by initiating ZoneMinder 
monitoring and capture on receipt of X10 signals from elsewhere, for instance 
the triggering of an X10 PIR.

zmwatch.pl - This is a simple script purely designed to keep an eye on the 
capture daemons and restart them if they lockup. It has been known for sync 
problems in the video drivers to cause this so this script makes sure that 
nothing important gets missed.

zm - This is the (optional) ZoneMinder init script, see below for details.

Finally, check zm_config.php in the web directory and amend any configuration 
necessary in there. Most will have already been done by the configuration 
utilities.

At this stage typing 'make install' will install everything to the desired 
locations, you may to su to root first though. The installation routine will 
copy the binaries and scripts to your chosen install location, usually 
/usr/local/bin and then move zms to your cgi-bin area. It will then copy the web 
files to your chosen directory and ensure they have the right permissions. 
Finally it tries to link zm.php to index.php but will not overwrite an existing 
file if it exists.

The 'zm' script does not get installed automatically as it is not necessary for 
the operation of the ZoneMinder setup per se. However if you want to ensure that 
the ZoneMinder daemons are started on reboot etc copy it to your init.d 
directory, usually something like /etc/rc.d/init.d and then add it by doing

/sbin/chkconfig --add zm

or similar command. ZoneMinder will then start up when your machine reboots and 
can be controlled (by the root user) by doing 'service zm start' or 'service zm 
stop' etc.

Now start your web browser and point it at your zm.php and off you go.


Tutorial
========

To start with you should see the ZoneMinder Console window, this will resize 
itself to avoid being too intrusive on your desktop. Along the top there are 
several informational entries like the time of the last update and the current 
server load. There will also be a 'start' or 'stop' link depending on the 
current state. Below that are various other links including a set allowing you 
to configure your bandwidth. This enables you to optimise your settings 
depending on where you are, the actual values relating to this are defined at 
the top of the zm_config.php file. If you are using a browser on the same 
machine or network then choose high, over a cable or DSL link maybe choose 
medium and over a dialup choose low. You can experiment to see which is best. 
This setting is retained on a per machine basis with a persistent cookie. Also 
on this line is a 'Report Bug' email link which you can use to easily report any 
problems (or successes!) and a couple of other links to the left which will be 
covered below.

Defining Monitors
-----------------
To use ZoneMinder properly you need to define at least one Monitor. Essentially 
a monitor is associated with a camera and will continually check it for motion 
detection and such like. So, next click 'Add New Monitor' to bring up the 
dialog. You will see a bunch of things you have to fill in.

To help you get started on the video configuration the best thing is to us a 
tool like 'xawtv' to get a picture you're happy with, and to check your camera 
works and then run 'zmu -d <device_no> -q -v' to get a dump of the settings. You 
can then enter these values into the video related options of the monitor 
configuration panel. Note that 'device_no' here is a number corresponding to the 
digit at the end of your device file, so /dev/video0 has a 'device_no' of 0 etc. 
If 'zmu' gives you an error related to permissions run 'zmfix -a' to make sure 
you can access all the video devices.

The options explained in a little more detail are as follows,

Name - First choose a name for it, anything you like. 

Function - This essentially defines what the monitor is doing. This can be 
'None' meaning the monitor is currently disabled, 'Passive' meaning you can 
watch the streams coming from the camera but no alarms or events will be 
generated, or 'Active' meaning all the images will be analysed as well as the 
stream being available to watch. If you have specified X10 support then X10 is 
also available as an option which means that the monitor is generally passive 
but may go active on receipt of X10 commands. Generally you'll want 'Active' but 
for now leave this at 'None'. 
Source Type - This determines whether the camera is a local one attached to a 
physical video or USB port on your machine or a remote network camera or 
similar. Choosing one or the other affects which set of three options are show 
next.

Device Number/Channel - For a local camera enter the device number that your 
camera is attached to. If it is /dev/video0 enter '0' etc. Some video devices, 
e.g. BTTV cards support multiple cameras so in the Channel box choose the 
appropriate channel, or leave it at zero if you're using a USB camera or one 
without channels. 

Device Format - For a local camera enter the video format of the video stream. 
This is defined in various system files (e.g. /usr/include/linux/videodev.h) but 
the two most common are 0 for PAL and 1 for NTSC.

Remote Host/Port/Path - For remote cameras use these fields to enter the full 
URL of the camera. Basically if your camera is at 
http://camserver.home.net:8192/cameras/camera1.jpg then these fields will be 
camserver.com, 8192 and /cameras/camera1.jopg respectively. Leave the port at 80 
if there is no special port required.

Capture Width/Height - The dimensions of the video stream your camera will 
supply. If your camera supports several just enter the one you'll want to use 
for this application, you can always change it later. However I would recommend 
starting with no larger than 352x288 and then perhaps increasing and seeing how 
performance is affected. This size should be adequate in most cases.

Capture Colour Depth - Finally for the video part of the configuration enter the 
colour depth. ZoneMinder supports both 8 bit greyscale and 24 bit colour, so 
choose one or the other here. Currently it doesn't support any of the more 
esoteric formats, like 15 bit etc. 

Timestamp Label Format - This relates to the timestamp that is applied to each 
frame. It is a sprintf style string. It is actually passed through sprintf and 
then through print to add the monitor name so a format of '%%s - %y/%m/%d 
%H:%M:%S' would be recommended though you can modify it if necessary. If you 
don't want a timestamp or have a camera that puts one on itself then leave this 
field blank.

Timestamp Label X/Y - The X and Y values determine where to put the timestamp a 
value of 0 for the X value will put it on the left side of the image and a Y 
value of 0 will place it at the top of the image. A Y value of the height you 
supplied earlier minus 8 will place it on the bottom of the image.

Image Buffer Size - This option determines how many frames are held in the ring 
buffer at any one time. The ring buffer is the storage space where the last 'n' 
images are kept, ready to be resurrected on an alarm or just kept waiting to be 
analysed. It can be any value you like with a couple of provisos, (see next 
options). However it is stored in shared memory and making it too large 
especially for large images with a high colour depth can use a lot of memory. A 
value of no more than 100 is usually ok.

Warmup Frames - This specifies how many frames the analysis daemon should 
process but not examine when it starts. This allows it to generate an accurate 
reference image from a series of images before looking too carefully for any 
changes. I use a value of 25 here, too high and it will take a long time to 
start, too low and you will get false alarms when the analysis daemon starts up.

Pre/Post Event Image Buffer - These options determine how many frames from 
before and after an event should be preserved with it. This allows you to view 
what happened immediately prior and subsequent to the event. A value of 10 for 
both of these will get you started but if you get a lot of short events and 
would prefer them to run together to form fewer longer ones then increase the 
Post Event buffer size. Both of these values added together should not exceed 
the ring buffer size.

Maximum FPS - On some occasions you may have one or more cameras capable of high 
capture rates but find that you generally do not require this performance at all 
times and would prefer to lighten the load on your server. This option permits 
you to limit the maximum capture rate to a specified value. This may allow you 
to have more cameras supported on your system by reducing the CPU load or to 
allocate video bandwidth unevenly between cameras sharing the same video device. 
This value is only a rough guide and the lower the value you set the less close 
the actual FPS may approach it especially on shared devices where it is 
difficult to synchronise two different capture rates precisely. There is a 
global option in zmconfig.pl that allows you to turn this limiting off in the 
event of an alarm.

FPS Report Interval - How often the current performance in terms of Frames Per 
Second is output to the system log. Not used in any functional way so set it to 
maybe 1000 for now. If you watch /var/log/messages (normally) you will see this 
value being emitted at the frequency you specify both for video capture and 
processing.

Reference Image Blend %ge - Each analysed image in ZoneMinder is a composite of 
previous images and is formed by applying the current image as a certain 
percentage of the previous reference image. Thus, if we entered the recommended 
value of 10 here, each images part in the reference image will diminish by a 
factor of 0.9 each time round. So a typical reference image will be 10% the 
previous image, 9% the one before that and then 8.1%, 7.2%, 6.5% and so on of 
the rest of the way. An image will effectively vanish around 25 images later 
than when it was added. This blend value is what is specified here and if higher 
will make slower progressing events less detectable as the reference image would 
change more quickly. Similarly events will be deemed to be over much sooner as 
the reference image adapts to the new images more quickly. In signal processing 
terms the higher this value the steeper the event attack and decay of the 
signal. It depends on your particular requirements what the appropriate value 
would be for you but start with 10 here and adjust it later if necessary.

X10 Activation String - This option is only available if you have specified X10 
support in the configuration. If you have then this contents of this field 
determine when a monitor starts and stops being Active if its function is set to 
X10. Basically what this means is that a monitor with a Function of X10 normally 
acts as it is Passive, i.e. you can watch the video stream but no analysis is 
done. On receipt of the appropriate X10 signal however it effectively changes to 
Active mode and starts to analyse images until an X10 signal changes it back to 
Passive again. The format of this string is as follows,
	n : If you simply enter a number then the monitor will be activated when 
an X10 ON signal for that unit code is detected and will be deactivated when an 
OFF signal is detected.
	!n : This inverts the previous mode, e.g. !5 means that the monitor is 
activated when an OFF signal for unit code 5 is detected and deactivated by an 
ON.
	n+ : Entering a unit code followed by + means that the monitor is 
activated on receipt of a ON signal for that unit code but will ignore the OFF 
signal and as such will not be deactivated by this instruction. If you prepend a 
'!' as per the previous definition it similarly inverts the mode, i.e. the ON 
signal deactivates the monitor.
        n+<seconds> : As per the previous mode except that the monitor will 
deactivate itself after the given number of seconds.
	n- : Entering a unit code followed by - means that the monitor is 
deactivated on receipt of a OFF signal for that unit code but will ignore the ON 
signal and as such will not be activated by this instruction. If you prepend a 
'!' as per the previous definition it similarly inverts the mode, i.e. the OFF 
signal activates the monitor.
        n+<seconds> : As per the previous mode except that the monitor will 
activate itself after the given number of seconds.
You can also combine several of these expressions to by separating them with a 
comma to create multiple circumstances of activation. However for now leave this 
blank.

X10 Input Alarm String - This has the same format as the previous field but 
instead of activating the monitor with will cause a forced alarm to be generated 
and an event recorded if the monitor is Active. The same definition as above 
apply except that for activated read alarmed and for deactivated read 
unalarmed(!). Again leave this blank for now.

X10 Output Alarm String - This X10 string also has the same format as the two 
above options. However it works in a slightly different way. Instead of 
ZoneMinder reacting to X10 events this option controls how ZoneMinder emits X10 
signals when the current monitor goes into or comes out of the alarm state. Thus 
just entering a number will cause the ON signal for that unit code to be sent 
when going into alarm state and the OFF signal when coming out of alarm state. 
Similarly 7+30 will send the unit code 7 ON signal when going into alarm state 
and the OFF signal 30 seconds later regardless of state. The combination of the 
X10 instruction allows ZoneMinder to react intelligently to, and also assume 
control of, other devices when necessary. However the indiscriminate use of the 
Input Alarm and Output Alarm signals can cause some horrendous race conditions 
such as a light going on in response to an alarm which then causes an alarm 
itself and so on. Thus some circumspection is required here. Leave this blank 
for now anyway.

Finally, click 'Save' to add your monitor.

On the main console listing you will now see your monitor and some of its vital 
statistics. Each column is also a link and you get to other functions of 
ZoneMinder by choosing the appropriate one. Describing them left to right, they 
are as follows.

The first column is the Id, clicking on this gives you the opportunity to edit 
any of the settings you have just defined your monitor to have.

The next column is the Name column, clicking on this will give you the watch 
window where you can view a live feed from your camera. This is described more 
fully below.

Following that is the Function and Source columns which may be represented in 
various colours. Initially both will be showing red. This means that that 
monitor is not configured for any function and as a consequence has no zmc 
(capture) daemon running on it. If it were orange it would mean that a zmc 
daemon was running but no zma (analysis) daemon and green means both are 
running. In our case it is red because we defined the Monitor to have a Function 
of None so no daemons are required. To get the daemons up and running you can 
either click on the source listed in the Source column and edit the monitor 
properties or click on the Function listed and change it to 'Passive' or 
'Active', which will ensure that one or more appropriate daemons are started 
automatically.

Having a device status of red or orange does not necessarily constitute an error 
if you have deliberately disabled a monitor or have just put it into Passive 
mode.

If you have several cameras (and thus monitors) on a device the device status 
colour reflects all of them for the capture daemon. So if just one monitor is 
active then the daemon is active for both even if all the other monitors are 
switched off.

Once you have changed the function of your monitor, the main console window will 
be updated to reflect this change. If your device status does not go green then 
check your system and web server logs to see if it's something obvious.

You can now add further monitors if you have cameras set up to support them. 
Once you have one or more monitors you may notice the '<n> Monitors' title 
becomes a link which allows you to cycle through a shot from each of your 
monitors (unless they are switched off) and get a streamed or still image from 
each in turn. There may also be a link titled 'Montage' which allows you view 
all your enabled cameras simultaneously. Be aware however that this can consume 
large amounts of bandwidth and CPU so should not be used continuously unless you 
have resource to burn. 

Defining Zones
--------------
The next important thing to do with a new monitor is set up Zones for it to use. 
By default you'll already have one created for you when you created your monitor 
but you might want to modify it or add others. Click on the Zones column for 
your monitor and you should see a small popup window appear which contains an 
image from your camera overlain with a stippled pattern representing your zone. 
In the default case this will cover the whole image and will be red. Beneath 
that will be a table containing a listing of your zones. Clicking on either the 
relevant bit of the image or on the Id or Name in the table will bring up 
another window where you can edit the particulars for your Zones. As you can see 
there are quite a few, so now is a good time to go through them. The options are 
as follows.

Firstly the zone Name appears, you can change this to be more representative if 
you like, though it isn't used much except for logging and debugging.

After that is the zone Type, this is one of the more important concepts in 
ZoneMinder and there are four to choose from. The one you'll use most often, and 
which will be set for your default zone, is 'Active'. This means that this zone 
will trigger an alarm on any events that occur within it that meet the selection 
criteria. The next two options I'll cover shortly but the one at the bottom is 
Inactive, which is the opposite of Active. In this zone type no alarms will ever 
be reported. Create an Inactive zone to cover any areas in which nothing notable 
will ever happen or where you get constant false alarms that don't relate to 
what you are trying to monitor. An Inactive zone can overlay other zone types 
and will be processed first.

The next option is Inclusive and you'd use this zone type for any zones that you 
want to trigger an alarm only if at least one other Active zone has already 
triggered one. This might be for example to cover an area of the image like a 
plant or tree which moves a lot and which would trigger lots of alarms. Perhaps 
this is behind an area you'd like to monitor though, in this case you'd create 
an active zone covering the non-moving parts and an inclusive zone covering the 
tree perhaps with less sensitive detection settings also. If something triggered 
an alarm in the Active zone and also in the Inclusive zone they would both be 
registered and the resulting alarm would be that much bigger than if you had 
blanked it out altogether.

After that, the next zone Type is Exclusive, this means that alarms will only be 
triggered in this zone if no alarms have already been triggered in Active zones. 
This is the most specialised of the zone types and you may never use it but in 
its place it is very useful. For instance in the camera covering my garden I 
keep watch for a hedgehog that visits most nights and scoffs the food out of my 
cats bowls. By creating a sensitive Exclusive zone in that area I can ensure 
that a hedgehog alarm will only trigger if there is activity in that small area. 
If something much bigger occurs, like someone walking by it will trigger a 
regular alarm and not one from the Exclusive zone. Thus I can ensure I get 
alarms for big events and also special small events but not the noise in 
between.

The final zone Type is relatively recent and this is a Preclusive zone. It is 
called that because if it is triggered it actually precludes an alarm being 
generated for that image frame. So motion or other changes that occur in a 
Preclusive zone will have the effect of ensuring that no alarm occurs. The 
application for this zone type is primarily as a shortcut for detecting general 
large-scale lighting or other changes. Generally this may be achieved by 
limiting the maximum number of alarm pixels or other measure in an Active zone. 
However in some cases that zone may cover an area where the area of variable 
illumination occurs in different places as the sun and/or shadows move and it 
thus may be difficult to come up with general values. Additionally, if the sun 
comes out rapidly then although the initial change may be ignored in this way as 
the reference image catches up an alarm may ultimately be triggered as the image 
becomes less different. Using one or more Preclusive zones offers a different 
approach. Preclusive zones are designed to be fairly small, even just a few 
pixels across, with quite low alarm thresholds. They should be situated in areas 
of the image that are less likely to have motion occur such as high on a wall or 
in a corner. Should a general illumination change occur they will be triggered 
at least as early as any Active zones and prevent any other zones from 
generating an alarm. Obviously careful placement is required to ensure that they 
do not cancel any genuine alarms or that they are not so close together that any 
motion just hops from one Preclusive zone to another. As always, the best way is 
to experiment a little and see what works for you.

I mentioned above that Inactive zones may be overlaid on other zones to blank 
out areas however as a general principle you should try and make zones abut each 
other as much as possible and not overlap. This helps avoid repeated duplicate 
processing of the same area. For instance an Inclusive zone overlaying an Active 
zone when all other settings are the same will always trigger when the Active 
zone does which somewhat defeats the object of the exercise. One exception to 
this is Preclusive zones. These may be situated within Active areas are they are 
processed first and if small may actually save processing time by preventing 
full analysis of the image.

The rest of the zone settings are slightly simpler to explain. The first is 
Units which details whether certain of the following settings are in Pixels or 
Percent of the frame. In general pixels is more precise whereas percentages are 
easier to use to start with. If you change this setting all appropriate values 
below are redisplayed in the correct context. A good tip would be to initially 
enter the settings in Percent and then change to Pixels and refine any gaps. 
Repeated flipping between the settings will cause rounding errors, as ZoneMinder 
in general is not at home to Mr Floating Point for reasons of performance. 

Following the units the next four settings define the bounds of the Zone in the 
monitor frame and are self-explanatory with the exception of the fact that the 
minima are at the top left of the frame and the maxima are at the bottom right 
rather than Cartesian. The option after that allows you to specify what colour 
you'd like any alarms this zone generates to be highlighted on images, pick 
anything you like that will show up against your normal image background. This 
and all following options are irrelevant for Inactive zones and you will be 
prevented from setting them.

Motion Detection
-----------------
The options that follow are all related to motion detection and now would be a 
good time to describe how that works. Once a stream of images starts coming 
through the zma daemon will begin analysing them initially there will be a warm-
up period where it does nothing except start to build up a reference image. How 
this is done was explained above.

So to go back to the settings, the next one is an alarm threshold; this 
represents the difference in value between a pixel and its predecessor. For 
greyscale images this is simple but for colour images the colours are averaged 
first, originally this used an RMS (root mean squared) algorithm but calculating 
square roots mugs performance and does not seem to improve detection. Using an 
average does means that subtle colour changes without any brightness change may 
go undetected but this is not the normal circumstance.

The following two settings define the minimum and maximum number of pixels that 
exceed this threshold that would cause an alarm. If the units are Percent this 
(and following options) refers to the percentage of the frame and not the zone, 
this is so these values can be related between zones. The minimum value must be 
matched or exceeded for an alarm to be generated whereas the maximum must not be 
exceeded or the alarm will be cancelled. This is to allow for sudden changes 
such as lights coming on etc, which you may wish to disregard. In general a 
value of zero for any of these settings causes that value to be ignored, so you 
can safely set a maximum to zero and it will not be used. The use of just a 
number of pixels is however a very brute force method of detection as many small 
events dispersed widely are not distinguished from a compact one.

To combat this ZoneMinder applies several other functions to the data to improve 
its ability to distinguish interesting signals from uninteresting noise. The 
first of these is a filter that removes any pixels that do not participate in a 
contiguous block of pixels above a certain size. The options that control this 
are the Filter Width and Height settings, which are always pixels and which 
should be fairly small, and an odd number. Application of this filter removes 
any tiny or discontinuous pixels that don't form part of a discrete block. 

Following that are two further bounds that specify the limits of pixels that 
would cause an alarm after this filtering process. As the filtering process only 
removes pixels it makes no sense for the Minimum and Maximum Filtered Area to be 
larger than the equivalent Alarmed Area and in general they should be smaller or 
the same.

The next step in the analysis phase is the collation of any remaining alarmed 
areas into contiguous blobs. This process parses the image and forms any pixels 
that adjoin other alarmed pixels into one or more larger blobs. These blobs may 
be any shape and can be as large as the zone itself or as small as the filtered 
size. The Minimum and Maximum Blob Size settings allow you to define limits 
within which an alarm will be generated. Of these only the Minimum is likely to 
be very useful. Finally the Minimum and Maximum Blobs specify the limits of the 
actual number of blobs detected. If an image change satisfies all these 
requirements it becomes an alarm event.

Viewing Monitors
----------------
As this point you should have one or more Monitors running with one or more 
Zones each. Returning to the main Console window you will see your monitors 
listed once more. The columns not explored so far are the Monitor name, and 
various event totals for certain periods of time. Clicking on any of the event 
totals will bring up a variation on the same window but click on the Monitor 
name for now. On doing so up will pop another window which should be scaled to 
contain a heading, an image from your monitor, a status and a list of events if 
any have been generated. Depending on whether you are able to view a streamed 
image or not the image frame will either be this stream or a series of stills. 
You have the option to change from one to the other (if available) at the centre 
of the top heading.

The image should be self-explanatory but if it looks like garbage it is possible 
that the video configuration is wrong so look in your system error log and check 
for or report anything unusual. The centre of the window will have a tiny frame 
that just contains a status; this will be 'Idle', 'Alarm' or 'Alert' depending 
on the function of the Monitor and what's going on in the field of view. Idle 
means nothing is happening, Alarm means there is an alarm in progress and Alert 
means that an alarm has happened and the monitor is cooling down, if another 
alarm is generated in this time it will just become part of the same event. 
These indicators are colour coded in green, red and amber.

By default if you have minimised this window or opened other windows in front it 
will pop up to the front if it goes to Alarm state. This behaviour can be turned 
off in configuration if required. You can also specify a sound file in the 
configuration, which will be played when an alarm occurs to alert you to the 
fact if you are not in front of your computer. This should be a short sound of 
only a couple of seconds ideally. Note that as the status is refreshed every few 
seconds it is possible for this not to alert you to every event that takes 
place, so you shouldn't rely on it for this purpose if you expect very brief 
events. Alternatively you can decrease the refresh interval for this window in 
the configuration though having too frequently refreshing may impact on 
performance.

Below the status is a list of recent events that have occurred, by default this  
is a listing of just the last 10 but clicking on 'All' will give you a full list  
and 'Archive' will take you to the event archive for this monitor, more on this  
later. Clicking on any of the column headings will sort the events 
appropriately.
From here you can also delete events if you wish. The events themselves are 
listed with the event id, and event name (which you can change), the time that 
the event occurred, the length of the event including any preamble and postamble 
frames, the number of frames comprising the event with the number that actually 
contain an alarm in brackets and finally a score. This column lists the average 
score per alarm frame as well as the maximum score that any alarm frame had.

The score is an arbitrary value that essentially represents the percentage of 
pixels in the zone that are in blobs divided by the square root of the number of 
blobs and then divided by the size of the zone. This gives a nominal maximum of 
100 for a zone and the totals for each zone are added together, Active zones 
scores are added unchanged, Inclusive zones are halved first and Exclusive zones 
are doubled. In reality values are likely to be much less than 100 but it does 
give a simple indication of how major the event was.

Filtering Events
----------------
The other columns on the main console window contain various event totals for 
your monitor over the last hour, day, week and month as well as a grand total 
and a total for events that you may have archived for safekeeping. Clicking on 
one of these totals or on the 'All' or 'Archive' links from the monitor window 
described above will present you with a new display. This is the full event 
window and contains a list of events selected according to a filter which will 
also pop up in its own window. Thus if you clicked on a 'day' total the filter 
will indicate that this is the period for which events are being filtered. The 
event listing window contains a similar listing to the recent events in the 
monitor window. The primary differences are that the frames and alarm frames and 
the score and maximum score are now broken out into their own columns, all of 
which can be sorted by clicking on the heading. Also this window will not 
refresh automatically, rather only on request. Other than that, you can choose 
to view events here or delete them as before.

The other window that appeared is a filter window. You can use this window to 
create your own filters or to modify existing ones. You can even save your 
favourite filters to re-use at a future date. Filtering itself is fairly simple; 
you first choose how many expressions you'd like your filter to contain. 
Changing this value will cause the window to redraw with a corresponding row for 
each expression. You then select what you want to filter on and how the 
expressions relate by choosing whether they are 'and' or 'or' relationships. For 
filters comprised of many expressions you will also get the option to bracket 
parts of the filter to ensure you can express it as desired.

There are several different elements to an event that you can filter on, some of 
which require further explanation. These are as follows, 'Date/Time' which must 
evaluate to a date and a time together, 'Date' and 'Time' which are variants 
which may only contain the relevant subsets of this, 'Weekday' which as expected 
is a day of the week. All of the preceding elements take a very flexible free 
format of dates and time based on the PHP strtotime function 
(http://www.zend.com/manual/function.strtotime.php). This allows values such as 
'last Wednesday' etc to be entered. I recommend acquainting yourself with this 
function to see what the allowed formats are.

The other elements you can filter on are all fairly self explanatory except 
perhaps for 'Archived' which you can use to include or exclude Archived events. 
In general you'll probably do most filtering on un-archived events. Once your 
filter is specified, clicking 'submit' will filter the events according to your 
specification. If you have created a filter you want to keep, you can name it 
and save it by clicking 'Save'.

If you do this then the subsequent dialog will also allow you specify whether 
you want this filter automatically applied in order to archive or delete events 
or upload events via ftp to another server and mail notifications of events to 
one or more email accounts. You can choose multiple actions per event, for 
instance uploading an event and then archiving or deleting it. In most cases you 
can specify your preferences for upload formats and email content during 
configuration time (make sure you type '?' to get help on options). Emails and 
messages (essentially small emails intended for mobile phones or pagers) have a 
variety of tokens that can be substituted for various details of the event that 
caused them. This includes links to the event view or the filter as well as the 
option of attaching images or videos to the email itself. See the included 
templates zmconfig_eml.txt and zmconfig_msg.txt for a fuller explanation of the 
availability and meaning of these tokens.

Filtering is a powerful mechanism you can use to eliminate events that fit a 
certain pattern however in many cases modifying the zone settings will better 
address this. One of the areas where it really comes into its own is in applying 
time filters, so for instance events that happen during weekdays or at certain 
times of the day are highlighted, uploaded or deleted.

Viewing Events
--------------
From the monitor or filtered events listing you can now click on an event to 
view it in more detail. If you have streaming capability you will see a series 
of images that make up the event. You will also see a link to allow you to view 
the still images themselves. If you don't have streaming then you will be taken 
directly to this page. The images themselves are thumbnail size and depending on 
the configuration and bandwidth you have chosen will either be the full images 
scaled in your browser of actual scaled images. If it is the latter, if you have 
low bandwidth for example, it may take a few seconds to generate the images. If 
thumbnail images are required to be generated, they will be kept and not re-
generated in future. Once the images appear you can mouse over them to get the 
image sequence number and the image score.

You will notice for the first time that alarm images now contain an overlay 
outlining the blobs that represent the alarmed area. This outline is in the 
colour defined for that zone and lets you see what it was that caused the alarm. 
Clicking on one of the thumbnails will take you to a full size window where you 
can see the image in all its detail and scroll through the various images that 
make up the event. If you have the ZM_RECORD_EVENT_STATS option on, you will be 
able to click the 'Stats' link here and get some analysis of the cause of the 
event. Should you determine that you don't wish to keep the event, clicking on 
Delete will erase it from the database and file system. Returning to the event 
window, other options here are renaming the event to something more meaningful, 
refreshing the window to replay the event stream, deleting the event, switching 
between streamed and still versions of the event (if supported) and generating 
an MPEG video of the event (if supported).

These last two options require further explanation. Archiving an event means 
that it is kept to one side and not displayed in the normal event listings 
unless you specifically ask to view the archived events. This is useful for 
keeping events that you think may be important or just wish to protect. Once an 
event is archived it can be deleted or unarchived but you cannot accidentally 
delete it when viewing normal unarchived events.

The final option of generating an MPEG video is still somewhat experimental and 
it's usefulness may vary. It can use either the Berkeley MPEG encoder or the 
faster and new ffmpeg encoder. Either of these will generate a short video which 
will be downloaded to your browsing machine to view. Due to the relatively slow 
frame rate that ZoneMinder will capture at and the high minimum frame rate that 
the Berkeley encoder uses videos created by this method will be very quick. 
However when using the ffmpeg encoder, ZoneMinder will attempt to match the 
duration of the video with the duration of the event. This has the useful effect 
of making the video watchable and not too quick while having the unfortunate 
side effect of increasing file size and generation time. Ffmpeg in particular 
has a particularly rich set of options and you can specify during configuration 
which additional options you may wish to include to suit your preferences.

Building an MPEG video, especially for a large event, can take some time and 
should not be undertaken lightly as the effect on your host box of many CPU 
intensive encoders will not be good. However once a video has been created for 
an event it will be kept so subsequent viewing will not incur the generation 
overhead. I will be the first to admit that this area of the package is not 
particularly well implemented and needs work, and probably a better encoder. 
Videos can also be included in notification emails however care should be taken 
when using this option as for many frequent events the penalty in CPU and disk 
space can quickly mount up.

That pretty much is it for the tour. You should experiment with the various 
setting to get the results you think are right for your. Naturally letting 
thousands of events build up is not good for the database or your file system so 
you should endeavour to either prevent spurious events from being generated in 
the first place or ensure that you housekeep them strictly.

Have fun, please report any bugs or features you'd like to see and hopefully 
ZoneMinder can be your camera monitoring friend!

Philip Coombes (philip.coombes@zoneminder.com) - April 2003


Troubleshooting
===============

Life eh? Nothing ever works first time does it? In case you are having problems 
here are some things to try. If these don't work then feel free to get in touch 
and I'll see if I can suggest something else. The best places to look for errors 
are in your system error log (probably /var/log/messages on RedHat) and your web 
server log (/var/log/httpd/error_log). There should be something in one of those 
that gives you some kind of tip off.

Some things to check.
1. Device configuration. If you can't get your cameras to work in ZoneMinder, 
firstly make sure that you have the correct settings. Use xawtv or something 
like that to check for settings that work and then run zmu -d <device_no> -q -v 
to get the settings. If you can't get them to work with that then the likelihood 
is they won't work with ZoneMinder. Also check the system logs (usually 
/var/log/messages) for any video configuration errors. If you get some and 
you're sure they're not a problem then switch off ZM_STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG in 
zmconfig.pl and recompile and reinstall.
2. Start simple. Begin with a single monitor and single zone. You can run the 
zmc capture daemon from the command line as 'zmc --device 0' (or whatever your 
video device is). If it returns immediately there's a problem so check the logs, 
if it stays up then your video configuration is probably ok. To get more 
information out of it use debug as specified below. Also check that the shared 
memory segment has been created by doing 'ipcs -m'. Finally, beware of doing 
tests as root and then trying to run as another user as some files may not be 
accessible. If you're checking things as root make sure that you clean up 
afterwards!
3. Web server. Ensure that your web server can serve PHP files. It's also 
possible that your php.ini file may have some settings which break ZoneMinder, 
I'm not a PHP guru but setting safe mode may prevent your PHP files from running 
certain programs. You may have to set configuration to allow this. Also since 
the daemons are started by your web server, if it dies or is shut down then the 
daemons may disappear. In this version the daemons are run under the control of 
a script which should trap expected signals but it is possible this doesn't 
cover all circumstances.
4. One of the more common errors you can see in the log files is of the form 
'Can't shmget: Invalid argument'. Generally speaking this is caused by an 
attempt to allocate an amount of shared memory greater than your system can 
handle. The size it requests is base on the following formula, ring buffer size 
x image width x image height x 3 (for 24 bits images) + a bit of overhead. So if 
for instance you were using 24bit 640x480 then this would come to about 92Mb if 
you are using the default buffer size of 100. If this is too large then you can 
either reduce the image or buffer sizes or increase the maximum amount of shared 
memory available. If you are using RedHat then you can get details on how to 
change these settings at
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/database/RHDB-2.1-Manual/admin_user/kernel-
resources.html
You should be able to use a similar process with other distributions to modify 
the shared memory pool without kernel recompilations though in some cases this 
may be necessary. Note, this error also sometime occurs if you have an old 
shared memory segment lying around from a previous run that is too small. Use 
the ipcs and ipcrm commands to check and remove it if necessary.
5. If you get odd javascript errors and your web console or other screens come 
up with bits missing then it's possible that there is a problem with the PHP 
configuration. Since version 0.9.8 ZoneMinder has used short PHP open tags to 
output information, so instead of something like this '<?php echo $value ?>', it 
will be something like this '<?= $value ?>' which is easier and quicker to write 
as well as being neater. More information about this directive can be seen at 
the following location,
http://www.php.net/manual/en/configuration.directives.php#ini.short-open-tag 
However although by default most PHP installations support this form, some will 
need to have it switched on explicitly. To do this you will first need to find 
your php.ini file (do a 'locate php.ini' or 'find / -name php.ini'. Be aware 
however that sometimes you might find more than one, so ensure you identify the 
one that is actually being used. You will then need to find the line that starts 
'short_open_tag = ' and change the Off value to On. This wil correct the 
problem. However in some cases you may have explicitly switched it off, so that 
XML compliant documents can be more easily served, or you may even not have 
permission to edit the file. In this case you can go into the web directory of 
ZoneMinder and run 'sh retag.sh' which will replace all the short open tags in 
the files themselves with the longer variant. You will obviously have to 
remember to do this for each subsequent version of ZoneMinder that you install 
as well.
6. Use debug. ZoneMinder has various debug in it that by default will go into 
your system log (via syslog). These will be of the form of
"Sep 14 14:50:11 localhost zma-0[1975]: INF [Front: 221000 - Processing at 4.26 
fps ]"
where the zma-0 part identifies the daemon and the device it is running on. 
Entries with INF in are informational and not an error, if you see ERR then it 
is one, though not all are fatal. You can prevent this information from being 
emitted by setting the DLVL_zmc environment variable to -1 or less once things 
are working. If you want to run any of the daemons from the command line to 
test, setting DBG_PRINT to 1 will output the debug on the console and setting 
DLVL_zmc (or DLVL_zma etc) to a number between 0 and 9 will emit progressively 
more debug though there's not a lot in there at present.
6. Paths. I admit it, the various paths in ZoneMinder are a bit of a nightmare. 
Make sure that they are all correct and that permissions are such that the 
various parts of ZoneMinder can actually run.
7. Missing perl modules. There are various perl modules used by the various 
scripts. If you get errors about missing ones, the easiest way to install them 
is to type the following (you will probably need to be root),

perl -MCPAN -eshell

this will then (eventually, after some configuration if it's your first time) 
present you with a prompt. From there you can type install module, e.g. 
Term::ReadKey and the rest should be more or less automatic as it will chase any 
dependencies for you. There may be some initial configuration questions it might 
ask you on startup if you've never run it before and to speed things up I would 
not install a new Bundle at this point (it can end up building you a whole new 
perl if you're not careful) if it asks you but everything else should be quite 
straightforward.
8. Unsupported palettes. ZoneMinder currently is designed to use the simple 
palettes of greyscale and 24 bit as well as now the YUV420P palette. This should 
cover most cameras but it's possible that there are ones out there that might 
want to use more esoteric formats that ZoneMinder doesn't support. This will 
often show up as the capture daemon being unable to set picture attributes. If 
this occurs try using different palettes starting with greyscale and if you 
can't get anything to work let me know and I'll try and add it.
9. USB bus problems. If you have multiple USB cameras on one bus then it can 
appear as if ZoneMinder is causing your cameras to fail. This is because the 
bandwidth available to cameras is limited by the fairly low USB speed. In order 
to use more than one USB camera with ZoneMinder (or any application) you will 
need to inform the driver that there are other cameras requiring bandwidth. This 
is usually done with a simple module option. Examples are usb_alt=<n> for the 
OV511 driver and cams=<n> for CPIA etc. Check your driver documentation for more 
details. Be aware however that sharing cameras in this way on one bus will also 
limit the capture rate due to the reduced bandwidth.
10. Image corruption with Cambozola. Some users have reported that when 
installing a recent copy of the Cambozola java applet to view streaming images 
that they get corrupted or skewed images or worse errors about 'no part 
content'. The true cause of these errors is still being investigated but in the 
meantime a previous version of Cambozola, v0.22 is know to work fine in all 
circumstances and I recommend you use that. If you can't find it anywhere mail 
me and I will send it to you.

Also, if you are using IE under Windows and get lots of annoying clicks when 
various windows refresh then you'll need to edit your registry and remove the 
value for HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\Explorer\Navigating\.current 
or download the registry script to do it for you from 
http://www.zoneminder.com/downloads/noIEClick.reg

What's New
==========

Release 0.9.11 - Various new features and fixes. Hopefully the last release for 
a little while to allow things to settle before a 1.x series maturity.
- Added stats view - If you have the RECORD_EVENT_STATS directive set and are 
viewing a still image from an event you can now view the statistics recorded for 
that frame. This tells you why that frame triggered or participated in an alarm. 
This can be useful in tuning the various motion detection parameters and seeing 
why events occurred.
- Tabulated events - The main events view is now tabulated to look a bit nicer.
- New video palette support - As well as the existing greyscale and 24 bit RGB 
palettes, you can now choose YUV420P and RGB565. Rewrote the palette/colours 
area a bit to enable support for other palettes in the future if requested. Bear 
in mind though that YUV palettes are converted into RGB internally so if you 
have the choice RGB24 may be faster as it's the 'native' format used within. 
- Added preclusive zones - Added a new zone type, the preclusive zone. For full 
details see the relevant section above but in brief this is a zone type that if 
alarmed will actually prevent an alarm. This completes the pantheon of zone 
types I think.
- Fixed Mozilla JavaScript - Various JavaScript functionality did not function 
on Mozilla, Netscape and other browsers. This is now (hopefully) fixed.
- Allow image and mpegs to be attached to emails - Added new tokens (%EI1%, 
%EIM% and %EV%) to the filter emails. This allows the first alarm image, most 
highly scored alarm image and an alarm MPEG to be attached to alarm notification 
emails. Use %EV% especially with care!
- Fixed possible motion detection bug - I found a few double declared local 
variables left over from the rewrite. This may have affected the motion 
detection algorithm. Fixed now anyway.
- Modified scoring - Alarm scoring has been modified to give more granularity 
for smaller events. This will have the effect of raising the scores for small 
events while large ones will still be about the same.
- Fixed /cgi-bin path problem - Previously you could specify the real path to 
you cgi-bin directory if you have one but not the web path. You can now do both.
- Improved video handling in browser - The MPEG/video area of the web GUI had 
been a bit neglected and looked somewhat ugly. This has now been improved to a 
degree and looks a bit nicer.
- Added ffmpeg support - Historically ZoneMinder has only supported the Berkeley 
mpeg encoder which was slow and rather limited. ZoneMinder now supports the 
ffmpeg encoder as well which is much much faster and makes generation of MPEG 
videos at realistic frame rates more of a reality. As ffmpeg has so many options 
and everyone will probably want a different emphasis you can now also specify 
additional ffmpeg options via zmconfig.pl.
- Colourise greyscale image files - In past versions, captured greyscale images 
were stored as JPEG files with a corresponding greyscale colourspace. This saved 
a small amount of space but meant that mpeg_encode had to do a conversion to 
encode them, and ffmpeg just fell in a heap. Now you can optionally opt to have 
greyscale images saved as full 24 bit colourspace images (they still look the 
same) at the price of a small penalty in CPU and disk but allowing you to easily 
and quickly create MPEG files. This option is one by default but can be switched 
off if you do not require any MPEG encoding.
- Fast RGB diffs - Previously ZoneMinder used quite a loose method for 
calculating the differences between two colour images. This was basically 
averaging the differences between each of the RGB components to get an overall 
difference. This is still the default but by setting ZM_FAST_RGB_DIFFS to 'no' 
you can now make it calculate the Y (or brightness value) of the pixels and use 
the difference between those instead. This will be more accurate and responsive 
to changes but is may be slower especially on old machines. There is a slight 
double whammy here if you have a YUV palette for capture and set this option off 
as the image will be converted to RGB and then partially converted back to get 
the Y value. This is currently very inefficient and needs to be optimised. Also 
this type of Y based RGB conversion should probably be used elsewhere.
- Fixed STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG - Previously this actually behaved the opposite of 
what it was supposed to, i.e. if you wanted it strict it wasn't and vice versa. 
Thanks to Dan Merillat for pointing this one out.
- Adaptive frame skipping - In earlier versions of ZoneMinder the analysis 
daemon just read the last written frame at all times whether this meant skipping 
any in the meantime or not. This was usually fine until an event occurred when 
several pre-event images had to be written to the database and to disk. This 
meant that a delay of a second or more could occur before the next frame was 
analysed. The effect of this was that frame coverage of an event was poor at one 
of the most crucial times. Several optimisations have been such as writing all 
pre-event frames to the database in one go but the most significant is the use 
of an adaptive skipping algorithm. This means that the analysis daemon will try 
to read the frame after the previous one if it can and not just the latest 
written. Naturally this means it could start to fall behind so it will institute 
a skipped frame as it does so. In general use only the odd skipped frame is 
likely to occur as before but when an event occurs the analysis daemon has more 
work to do and may start to fall behind further. To counter this, the amount of 
skipped frames is increased to keep pace until a steady state occurs. This means 
that the coverage of the beginning of an event is likely to at least as good if 
not better than the remainder of it. It basically runs a frame overdraft for as 
long as it can to ensure optimal coverage of the event. If the event is short, 
then once complete the analysis daemon will continue to process its backlog and 
catch up. Use of this algorithm is controlled by the ZM_OPT_ADAPTIVE_SKIP option 
and is on by default. The only disadvantages of it are that the analysis daemon 
may run behind the capture daemon to some 'real-time-ness' may be sacrificed but 
this would only be a matter of seconds once an event has been running for a 
while. The second disadvantage is that for fast frame rate capture daemons, 
those of the order of 25fps, on slow machines it is possible for the analysis 
daemon to get so bogged down in comparison with the capture rate and not have 
time to adjust its rate. In this case a buffer overrun will occur and a warning 
will be produced.
- Frame daemon - Yes, a new daemon is born. As with the previous change this is 
to help ease the load of the analysis daemon during events. It is the 'zmf' 
daemon and exists purely to remove the need for the analysis daemon to write 
images to disk, which is a slow process. The analysis daemon will instead send 
it the frame image details via a socket connection and it will write them. This 
can speed up the analysis daemon somewhat depending on the speed of your disk as 
new files do not need to be opened up all the time. It can mean that file 
creation can fall a little behind though. Use of this daemon is optional and is 
controlled by the ZM_OPT_FRAME_SERVER option which is off by default. If n ot 
used or if an error occurs the analysis daemon will fall back to writing the 
images itself as before to ensure that none get lost.
- Tweaked reference image blending - Since day one the merging of reference 
images has been an 8 bit process. This lack of precision meant that some changes 
would never be reflected in the reference image and alarms will occur when they 
should not. This is now a 16 bit process which makes it a whole lot more 
accurate and responsive.
- Web colour change - I thought the old red, green and amber text colours were 
just a bit too gaudy so I've toned them down a bit. Hope you like them!

Release 0.9.10 - Many bug-fixes and major feature enhancements.
- Configure 'round' bug - Fixed a problem with the configure script that didn't 
detect if the 'round' function was already declared before try to do it itself.
- Low event id bug - Fixed bug where events with an id of < 1000 were being 
cleaned up by zmaudit.pl by mistake.
- Source files restructuring - The source files have been broken up and renamed 
extensively to support the first stage of the code being straightened out. 
Likewise the class structure has been rationalised somewhat. The php file names 
have also changed in some cases so it might be best to delete all your php and 
css files from the zone minder install directory first as the old ones won't be 
overwritten and will be left behind.
- Streamed cycle view - The monitor cycle view (the one where each monitor is 
displayed sequentially) now supports streams as well as stills.
- New 'montage' view - Added a montage view showing all your cameras 
simultaneously either streaming or stills. The width of this window (in terms of 
number of monitors) is a configuration option.
- Network camera support - A major change in this version is support for remote 
or network cameras. This is currently implemented as series of http grabs of 
stills rather than being able to break up motion jpeg streams. However frame 
rates of from 2-10 should be achievable depending on your network proximity to 
the cameras.
- Option BGR->RGB swap - Added the option to switch on or off the inversion of 
RGB to BGR for local cameras. It is on by default to maintain compatibility with 
previous releases.
- zmu suspend alarm option - Added new -n option to zmu to effectively suspend 
alarm detection for a monitor. This is intended for short term use and to 
support PTZ cameras where alarm detection is desired to be suspended while the 
camera changes orientation or zoom level.
- FPS limiting - Added a new option to monitors to add a maximum capture rate. 
This allows you to limit the amount of hits a network camera gets or to reduce 
the system load with many cameras. It also works with multi-port cards and 
limiting the capture rate on one camera allows the spare FPS to be allocated to 
other devices. For instance with two cameras and no throttle, I get about 4FPS 
each. Throttling one to 2FPS allows the other to operate at 6FPS so you can 
allocate your capture resources accordingly. This limiting can be disabled while 
alarms are occurring as a global option in zmconfig.pl.
- Alarm reference update - Added option to not blend alarmed images into the 
reference image. See the help in zmconfig.pl for caveats.
- Disappearing monitors - Fixed the disappearing monitor problem in the console 
view where monitors with no events were randomly not being shown.
- Clean and tidy - Cleaned up a load of compiler warnings and miscellanea to 
ensure a cleaner happier build.
- Streamed image headers - Made all headers in streamed images have full CRLF 
termination which will hopefully now prevent the problems with broken streams 
that had existed mostly with Mozilla (and hopefully won't break anything else).
- Expire streams - Added expiry headers to streamed images so they will always 
display fully.
- Event navigation - Added next, prev, delete & next, delete & prev navigation 
to events to allow you to quickly review events in sequence as had been 
requested by a number of people.
- USR blocking - The debug USR signals were not being blocked properly leading 
to nasty effects in zmc mostly.
- zmfilter execution - Previously zmfilter execution was not synchronised with 
the monitor state or the analysis daemon leading to it sometimes being run 
unnecessarily. From now on the zmfilter process will only run when a monitor is 
active and so actually potentially generating alarms.
- zmdc short statuses - Removed the logging of the short status values that 
zmdc.pl returns to it's clients which had been clogging up the log file.
- Bugs and pieces - Fixed various bug(ettes) that I came across that that I 
don't think had been reported or noticed so I don't think we need to talk about 
them here do we.

Release 0.9.9 - Mainly bug-fixes and minor feature enhancements.
- Added zmu -q/--query option - There is now a new query option for zmu. When 
combined with -d it gives the config of the device and when used with -m it 
dumps the current settings for the monitor and zones. Mostly useful for bug 
reporting. The previous version of zmu used with just -d gave this information 
for a video device by default. This now requires the -q option also to bring 
into line with it's -m equivalent.
- Added creation of events directory - Previously the 'events' directory was not 
created on install, this has been fixed.
- Can now retag PHP files if necessary - Version 0.9.8 was the first version to 
use short_open_tags in the PHP files. This caused grief to some people so this 
script will put them back to the long verion.
- Frame and event lengths fractional - A new field has been added to the Frames 
table. This is 'Delta' and is a fractional number of seconds relative to the 
event start time. This is intended to support the real-time playback of events 
rather than just 'as fast as possible' or with a configured delay as at present. 
The event length is now also fractional.
- Corrected extraneous Width to be Height - The last version of zmu included a 
Width comment which should have been height.
- Changed colour depth to bits - Having colour depths expressed in bytes has 
caused no end of problems. This is now changed to be bits and can be changed via 
a dropdown to limit what can be entered. Don't forget to run the zmalter script 
to update your DB.
- Renamed terminate to zm_terminate - The use of 'terminate' in zmc.cpp caused a 
conflict on some systems so renamed it to something more specific.
- Zone deletion problem - A problem was found such that when deleting zones the 
appropriate daemons were not being asked to restart daemons correctly.
- Console changes - The current version number is now displayed in the console. 
A refresh button has also been added along with a minor reorg.
- Added delete button enable to checkAll - Using the 'Check All' button in the 
main monitor window previously did not enable the delete button. This is now 
fixed.
- Reload on click - In previous versions the console window would reload if a 
monitor window for example was clicked. Thsi was removed in the last version 
which meant that sometimes the console never go refreshed as it's timing loop 
was broken. This functionality has now been reinstated.

Release 0.9.8 - Several new features and bug-fixes
- Upgrade note - If you have installed 0.9.7 and wish to save your configuration 
then copy your existing zmconfig.txt file over to your 0.9.8 directory and 
before running zmconfig.pl.
- Added multiple options to zmu - You can now give multiple options to zmu and 
get all the responses at once. However this is currently in a deterministic 
order and not related to the order you give them.
- Added -v/--verbose option to zmu - Zmu has been made more human friendly 
though it still remains primarily for daemon use. Giving the -v or --verbose 
option prints out a bit more as a response to each command.
- Add -d/--device to zmu - This option is designed to allow you to get your 
video device working with another application such as xawtv and then use zmu -d 
to print out the settings it's using
(especially with the -v option). These options can then be used as a starting 
point for your ZoneMinder configuration.
- Added FPS in status field - The status field in the web monitor views now 
contains an FPS setting as well as the status.
- Zmconfig changes - zmconfig handles missing options better and rewrites config 
file even in non-interactive mode.
- Fixed config problems in zmcfg.h - Some config was not being set up correctly 
in zmcfg.h.
- Zmwatch now works on image delay and not fps - Previously the zmwatch daemon 
detected capture daemon failure by trying to use the FPS setting. This was 
imprecise and prone to false readings. It now uses the time delay since the last 
captured image.
- Added zmpkg.pl and zm scripts - There are now two new scripts. zmpkg.pl is in 
charge of starting and stopping ZoneMinder as a whole package and zm is designed 
to be (optionally) installed into your init.d directory to use ZoneMinder as a 
service.
- Fixed bug in Scan mode - The monitor cycle or scan mode had stopped working 
properly due to images not being generated. This is now fixed.
- Revamped the console window slightly - The console window has now been 
reformatted slightly to give more and better information including server load.
- Added email and messaging to filters - Filters now allow you to send emails or 
messages (basically just short emails intended for mobile devices) on alarms. 
The format and possible content for these emails is in zmconfig_eml.txt and 
zmconfig_msg.txt.
- Made zmdc more aggresive in killing old processes - The zmdc.pl daeamon will 
now kill any ZoneMinder processes it finds on startup or shutdown to prevent 
orphans from being left around.
- Configuration changes - Previously there were a lot of files generated by 
configure. Now only zmconfig.pl is generated this way and all the other 
configuration files are created by zmconfig.pl (from .z files) to centralise 
configuration more.
- Fixed Cambozola opt bug - There was a bug in the Cambozola options, I can't 
remember what it was but it's fixed!
- Retaint arguments in zmdc.pl - In some installations zmdc was complaining 
about tainted arguments from the socket. These are now detainted prior to 
sending and after receiving.
- Forced alarms - You can now force alarms when looking at the monitor window 
should anything catch your attention. You have to remember to switch them off as 
well though.
- Looser video configuration - Some video configuration errors can now be 
ignored via the STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG option.
- Monitor window refresh on alarm - When the monitor window is active and an 
alarm has occurred the most recent alarms list is immediately refreshed to show 
it.

Release 0.9.7 - Yes, a big jump in release number but a lot of changes too. Now 
somewhat more mature, not really an alpha any more, and a lot of bugs fixed too. 
- Added zmconfig.pl script to help with configuration.
- Revamped to work better with configure scripts
- Monitors now have more configuration options, including some that were 
statically defined before such as location and format of the image timestamps.
- Removed Alarms table from schema as not required, never was actually...
- Added a number of new scripts, see the scripts directory
- Added Fast delete to PHP files. This allows the web interface to only delete 
the event entries themselves for speed and then have the zmaudit script 
periodically tidy up the rest.
- Added event filter to enable bulk viewing, upload or deletion of events 
according to various attributes. Filter can be saved and edited.
- Added last event id to shared memory for auto-filtering etc.
- Changed zmu -i option to write to monitor named image file.
- Made shared memory management somewhat more sensible.
- Now stores DB times as localtime rather than UTC avoiding daylight saving 
related bugs.
- Fixed bug with inactive zones and added more debug.
- Changed main functions to return int.
- Added help and usage to zmu.
- Fixed browser acceptance problem, more easily defaults to HTML.
- Split out the PHP files into a bunch with specific functions rather than one 
monolithic one.
- Fixed NetPBM paths and changed _SERVER to HTTP_SERVER_VARS.
- Added HUP signal on zone deletion.
- Added NETPBM_DIR and conditional netpbm stuff.
- Removed hard coded window sizes, all popup window dimensions can be specified 
in zmconfig.php
- Changed form methods to 'get' from 'post' to avoid resubmit warnings all the 
time.
- Added conditional sound to alarm on web interface.
- Fixed syntax error when adding default monitor.
- Some of the web views have changed slightly to accommodate the separate events 
view.
- And much much more, probably...

Release 0.0.1 - Initial release, therefore nothing new.


To Do
=====

Seeing as ZoneMinder is so young and has kind of evolved rather than being 
planned there are a bunch of improvements and enhancements still to do, here is 
just a sample.

1. Perhaps split out devices - I think devices should probably be a separate 
table and class from monitors. Not critical but would represent a better model.
2. Comments - Needs many more, but that's just me I'm hopeless at commenting 
things out. I'll get round to it soon though honest! You're lucky to even get 
this document.
3. Optimised zones - The zones could do with being sorted out a bit to optimise 
the processing of overlapping ones, at the moment you can waste resource unless 
your zones are kept very tidy.
4. Create zones using server side image maps - This would make it easier to 
precisely define and see where your zone is going to go. Not critical but handy 
but a bugger to do.
5. Zone Definitions - Allow zones to be defined according to a colour coded 
bitmap or as polygons. Currently all zones are rectangular this would add a bit 
of flexibility. Would need a bit of a rewrite though. This will incur a slight 
penalty on startup and a very slight one on processing for all reasonably shaped 
zones.
6. Security - I think I need to give the php file a bit of a good going over as 
I'm sure it's not done in the most secure way regarding passing things onto 
command line, exposing file paths and other stuff. I'm a bit of a PHP novice, as 
I'm sure you can tell so might need help here. I should have done it in perl!
7. Add support for other palettes to zmc even if all it does is convert them to 
RGB before looking at them.
8. Mouseover help - A bit more help popping up when you mouseover things would 
be handy. A bit more help full stop actually.
9. WAP interface - A bit of a crusade of mine I'm afraid. I'd like to put a WML 
interface on to allow you to view event listing and perhaps the most significant 
image from each event on your phone. Also simple management. From version 0.9.7 
there is a very basic crude initial version that probably won't work with your 
phone but its there as a testbed.
10. Automatic device configuration - Video 4 Linux supports various device 
queries, it should be possible to get most of the device capability information 
from the device itself. The zmu utility does this now but it's not yet 
integrated into the web pages.
11. Extend the API. Well ok it's not really got an API yet but the image data is 
held in shared memory in a very simple format. In theory you could use the 
capture daemon to gab the images and other things could read them from memory or 
the analysis daemon could read images from elsewhere. Either way this should be 
done through an API, and would need a library I think. Also the zmu utility 
could probably do a whole lot more to enable other things to manage when the 
daemons become active etc.
12. Access control should probably be built in rather than relying on .htaccess 
etc. This is a frequently requested feature (FRF) and must be done soon.
13. I've got lots of ideas for enhancing the motion detection part with optional 
algorithms etc. Just got to find the time somewhere!
14. Create .rpm packages (as there can be several dependencies) and maybe other 
types of packages also, e.g. for Debian distributions.
15. Allow ZoneMinder to 'train' itself by allowing the user to select events 
that are considered important and to discard those that should be ignored. 
ZoneMinder will interpolate, add a bit of magic, and recommend settings that 
will support this selection automatically thereafter. The hooks for this are 
already in to some extent.
16. Add quotes to all PHP array references. I should have done it in the first 
place but I'm a perl person really and it kind of bugs me that you have to.
17. Add sound support to allow a captured audio channel to be associated with a 
video device.


Bugs
====

1. I'm not sure if this is a bug or by design but the timestamp is added to the 
image by the capture daemon. I _think_ this isn't necessary as it may contribute 
to alarms, plus the time is associated with the image anyway. So I think this 
should be moved to the analysis daemon.
2. I suspect there may be a bug in zmaudit.pl if your monitor names have spaces 
in them. I've not been able to reproduce it but to be on the safe side don't put 
spaces in your Monitor names.
3. When opening a link to an event etc from a notification email the window that 
is opened is just a regular browser window and not in the context of a proper 
ZoneMinder web interface. Thus it comes up too big usually (not a major issue) 
and also things like 'Delete' don't work as it wants to do things to its parent 
(which is more of a major issue).
4. The .sock files used by the *nix sockets I suspect may have the odd 
permission issue now and again. I think everything recovers from it but it needs 
checking out.

Probably bucket loads more, just fire them at me.


Non-Bugs
========

1. Yes, those are tabs in the indents; I like tabs so don't go changing them to 
spaces or else. Also yes I also like my opening braces on their own line most of 
the time, what's the point of brackets that don't line up?

Everything else that isn't definitely broken is probably deliberate, or was once 
anyway.


License
=======

ZoneMinder is released under the GPL, see below.

ZoneMinder README, $Date$, $Revision$
Copyright (C) 2003  Philip Coombes

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under 
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software 
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later 
version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY 
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A 
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with 
this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple 
Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.

One of the main new features in ZoneMinder is the ability to use remote cameras.  
Traditionally ZoneMinder had only been able to work with cameras that are 
attached to the computer it is running on via USB or video connections. In this 
release, you can use cameras that are accessible via are web or network 
connection. Thus, you can use ZoneMinder to monitor either specialised network 
cameras or image streams that are uploaded to other web sites.

The other major change in this release, is that the files have been split into 
multiple header and source files.  One per each class.

A further improvement is the ability to specify the maximum value for the frames 
per second for capture by a camera. This allows you to allocate bandwidth and 
resource from one camera to the other by reducing the requirements of specific 
cameras or devices. Thus when several cameras share one device it allows those 
cameras specified as less important to give up their bandwidth to their peers.