zoneminder/README

ZONE MINDER v1.0.0
==================

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

Welcome to ZoneMinder, the new all-in-one Linux GPL'd security camera solution. 
A few months back my garage was burgled and they stole my wine and power tools! 
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 (hereafter referred to as ZM to save my fingers) is designed around a 
series of independent components that only function when necessary limiting any 
wasted resource and maximising the function 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 ZM 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 elsewhere. 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 now longer wish to keep. The web pages 
directly interact with the core daemons ensuring full co-operation at all times.

The core of ZM 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. ZM 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
============

ZM 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. Next it does things with JPEGs so you'll need at least 
libjpeg.a which I think come as standard nowadays. It also uses the netpbm 
utilities in a very limited way to generate thumbnails under certain 
circumstances though this can be modified. ZM 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 whatever as well. 
Finally, there is quite a bit of image streaming in the package so if you don't 
have Netscape 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 IE and others. Otherwise you're limited to just refreshing still 
images.

Hardware wise, ZM 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. 
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 7.2, which does have everything there by default I think. Please give me 
feedback on other distributions.


Building
========

Before you start building you have a couple of things to do. Firstly you'll have 
to create your ZoneMinder database and users. You'll need to identify these in 
zmcfg.h and in index.php. You'll notice that in zmcfg.h 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 'zm'. If you are upgrading 
from a previous version you can use zmalter.sql to upgrade your database and 
make the necessary changes. ZM also needs to know where it stores its events 
relative to the web root directory in zmcfg.h and where in full path terms in
zmconfig.php. There are also several other paths in index.php but these can wait 
until later.

The next step is tocheck and/or edit the src/Makefile.in and web/Makefile.in
files and make sure that the WEBUSR and WEBGRP definitions near the top are
appropriate for the user associated with your web server, ie. apache or web
or whatever you've defined. In the web/makefile.in file there is also another
definition which is webdir which should be the directory you want to install
the PHP files to, and in src/Makefile.in there is a similar definition of
cgidir which is where your CGI files should go. This is a bit of a pain I
will admit so if anyone can tell me how to get this stuff put into the configure
script I would be most grateful.

So to continue, just type './configure --with-mysql=/usr' (or your MySQL install 
path). Then just type 'make' and off you go.

I know what you are going to say next, it doesn't work. I hope it does but this 
is my first type with autoconf and quite honestly I haven't a clue what I'm 
doing so if you do get any build problems then just let me know and I'll try and 
tell you how to fix them. Alternatively if you are an automake/autoconf expert 
then please let me know what to do!

There are a couple of files in the package that come from other packages, this 
is just to simplify the build and reduce dependencies on other packages. 
Anything ZM specific is named as such.

It is possible to rebuild the whole thing from the enclosed automake files but
if you do you will have to ensure that the installation part for the php and
cgi files in the src/Makefile.in and web/Makefile.in is reconstructed, as it
is not present by default.


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 such frames off it as fast as possible, this 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.
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 no 'help' in it yet) but can be if necessary.

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 is actually required for
a minimal installation. These scripts all have some configuration at the top
of the files which should be viewed and amended if necesary and are as follows.

zmdc.pl - This is the ZoneMinder Daemon Control. This is used by the web 
interface to control the execution of the capture and analysis daemons amongst
others. You should not need to run this script yourself.
zmfilter.pl - This script control 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 so you will need to
modify it to suit your confguration.
zmaudit.pl - This script is used to check the consistency of the event file
system and database. It can delete orphaned events, ie. 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.php 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 ZM events or by initiating ZM monitoring and
capture on receipt of X10 signals from elsewhere, for instance the setting of
a domestic alarm system.

Finally, check zmconfig.php in the web directory and amend any configuration 
necessary in there.

At this stage typing 'make install' will install these everything to the desired 
locations.

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


Tutorial
========

To start with you should see the ZM Console window, this will resize itself to 
avoid being too intrusive on your desktop. Along the top there is a set of links 
to configure your bandwidth, this allows you to optimise your settings depending 
on where you are and the actual options relating to this are defined at the top 
of the index.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.

Defining Monitors
-----------------
To use ZM properly you need to define at least one Monitor. Essentially a 
monitor is attached to a camera and will continually check it for motion 
detection and such like. So, next click 'Add New Monitor' to bring up the 
dialog. First choose a name for it, anything you like. The next field is 
'Function' which 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. Generally you'll want 'Active' but for now 
leave this at 'None'. Next enter the device number that your camera is attached 
to. If it's /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. Next 
enter the video format, and 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. Finally 
enter the colour depth. ZM supports both greyscale and 24 bit colour, so enter 1 
or 3 here. Currently it doesn't support any of the more esoteric formats, like 
15 bit etc. Click 'update' 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 ZM by 
choosing the appropriate one. For the most part I'll describe them left to right 
but lets start with the Device column which you'll see showing red. This means 
that that device 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 device listed in the Device column, and 
start the daemons manually, or click on the Function listed and change it to 
'Active', which will ensure that the 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, so if just one monitor is 
active then both daemons will be running 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 like a bad path etc.

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 a 'Scan' link appears which 
allows you to cycle through a shot from each of your monitors (unless they are 
switched off) and get a still image from each in turn. Clicking on the image 
will take you to the monitor watch window, which will be discussed shortly.

Returning to the main console window, if you click the Id of your monitor in the 
listing then you will have the opportunity to edit any of the settings your 
originally defined your monitor to have.

Defining Zones
--------------
The next important thing to do is set up Zones for your monitors 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.

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 ZM and there are 
four to choose from. The one you'll use most and which will be set for your 
default zone if 'Active'. This means that this zone will trigger an alarm on any 
events that occur within 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.

The final 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. I mentioned above 
that Inactive zones may be overlain 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 overlaps to 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.

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 ZM 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. This 
image is a composite of the previous images and by default is formed of by 
applying the current image as 10% of the previous reference image. Thus 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 of 10% can be varied 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.

So to go back to the settings, the next one is an alarm threshold, this 
represents the difference in value between a pixel and it's 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 is 
matched or exceed 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 ZM 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 at the top of the index.php file. 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 12 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 post amble 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 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 it's 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 filter 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 delete events or 
upload events via ftp to another server. This functionality is explained in more 
detail elsewhere. 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. Where it really comes into it's own is 
generally 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 it's detail 
and scroll through the various images that make up 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 experimental 
and not likely to be highly useful. It uses the Berkeley MPEG encoder and will 
generate a short video which will be downloaded to your browsing machine to 
view. Due to the relatively slow frame rate that ZM will capture at and the high 
minimum frame rate that the encoder uses, each image is included twice. 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. 
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.

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 ZM 
can be your camera monitoring friend!

Philip Coombes (philip.coombes@zoneminder.com) - December 2002


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 ZM, firstly 
make sure that you have the correct settings. Use xawtv or something like that 
to check for settings that work. If you can't get them to work with that then 
the likelihood is they won't work with ZM.
2. Device permissions. Since the ZM daemons are started by your web server, you 
need to ensure that your video devices can be opened by the associated user, 
usually apache or web. It is often the case that these files are created with 
read access by root only (and sometimes reset on a reboot) so you might need to 
chmod a+r /dev/video0 etc. to make them readable.
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 ZM, 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. Use debug. ZM 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.
5. Paths. I admit it, the various paths in ZM are a bit of a nightmare. Make 
sure that they are all correct and that permissions are such that the various 
parts of ZM can actually run. Most of the places you need to specify this kind 
of information are at the top of the associated configuration files but I've not 
been able to get the automatic configure script to do all this by itself yet.

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

Whats New
=========

Release 1.0.0 - 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. 
- 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 them 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 hardcoded 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 accomdate the separate
events view.
- And much much more, probably.

Release 0.0.1 - Initial release, therefore nothing new.


To Do
=====

Seeing as ZM 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. Sort out the class structure - Frankly it's a bit of a mess at the moment 
with too many 'friends', it needs rationalising.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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. 20. This will incur a 
slight penalty on startup and a very slight one on processing for all reasonably 
shaped zones.
7. 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!
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. In version 1.0.0 
there is a very basic crude initial version that probably won't work with your 
phone but its there as a testbed. Note, temporary WAP files are not tidied up
properly so don't use it for extanded periods of time at present.
10. Email and SMS notifications - As with the FTP uploads, probably event the 
same daemon to let you know when something happens, perhaps configurable to 
report only certain types of events.
11. Templatise the php file. Personally I hate mixing up HTML and logic, perhaps 
use Smarty or something and separate the screens out from the rest.
12. 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.
13. Extend the X-10 integration - A handy feature would be to allow a generated 
event to trigger some other action perhaps to an attached X-10 interface, for 
instance turn lights on or make a dog barky noise!
14. 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.
15. Access control should probably be built in rather than relying on .htaccess 
etc.
16. I've got lots of ideas for enhancing the motion detection part with optional 
algorithms etc. Just got to find the time somewhere!
17. Create .rpm packages (as there can be several dependencies) and maybe other 
types of packages also, e.g. for Debian distributions.
18. Allow ZM to 'train' itself by allowing the user to select events that are 
considered important and to discard those that should be ignored. ZM will 
interpolate, add a bit of magic, and recommend settings that will support this 
selection automatically thereafter.
19. 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.


Bugs
====

1. Sometimes there is a sync error and very rarely a capture daemon just stops. 
Probably need a watchdog to restart it when this happens.
2. 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.

Probably a bucket load 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) 2002  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.