11/11/05 ZoneMinder 1.21.4 README 1
ZONEMINDER
V1.21.4
Open Source Linux Video Camera Security
http://www.zoneminder.com
CONTENTS
1. Introduction 4
2. Requirements 5
3. Components 6
4. Building 9
5. Installation 10
6. Upgrading 11
7. Installing from RPM 13
8. Tutorial 14
8.1.Defining Monitors 14
8.2.Defining Zones 20
8.3.Viewing Monitors 23
8.4.Controlling Monitors 23
8.5.Filtering Events 24
8.6.Viewing Events 25
8.7.Options and Users 26
9. Camera Control 28
9.1.Control Capabilities 28
9.2.Control Scripts 30
10. Mobile Devices 32
11. Troubleshooting 33
12. Change Log 36
12.1. Release 1.21.4
36
12.2. Release 1.21.3
38
12.3. Release 1.21.2
38
12.4. Release 1.21.1
38
12.5. Release 1.21.0
40
12.6. Release 1.20.1
41
12.7. Release 1.20.0
42
12.8. Release 1.19.5
43
12.9. Release 1.19.4
44
12.10. Release 1.19.3
45
12.11. Release 1.19.2
46
12.12. Release 1.19.1
47
12.13. Release 1.19.0
48
12.14. Release 1.18.1
49
12.15. Release 1.18.0
49
12.16. Release 1.17.2
51
12.17. Release 1.17.1
52
12.18. Release 1.17.0
52
12.19. Release 0.9.16
53
12.20. Release 0.9.15
55
12.21. Release 0.9.14
55
12.22. Release 0.9.13
56
12.23. Release 0.9.12
57
12.24. Release 0.9.11
58
12.25. Release 0.9.10
59
12.26. Release 0.9.9
60
12.27. Release 0.9.8
61
12.28. Release 0.9.7
62
12.29. Release 0.0.1
63
13. To Do 64
14. Bugs 65
15. Non-Bugs 66
16. License 67
Introduction
Welcome to ZoneMinder, the all-in-one Linux GPL'd security
camera solution.
A while back my garage was burgled and all my power tools were
stolen! 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 relatively new but hopefully it has developed to be
something that can be genuinely useful and prevent similar
incidents or even 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 II 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 let me know.
ZoneMinder is free but if you do get ZoneMinder up and running
and find it useful then please feel free to visit
http://www.zoneminder.com/donate.html where any donations will
be appreciated and will help to fund future improvements to
ZoneMinder. This would be especially relevant if you use
ZoneMinder as part of your business, or to protect your
property.
2. 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. If you are running an RPM based
distribution then it's probably worth installing all the pure
mysql rpm files to be sure you have the right ones.
Next it does things with JPEGs so you'll need at least
libjpeg.a which I think come as standard nowadays with most
distributions. Users have reported varying degrees of success
with other jpeg libraries such as jpeg-mmx but these are not
officially supported. If you plan to use network cameras then
the Perl Compatible Regular Expression library (libpcre.a) can
prove useful but is not always essential. ZoneMinder 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 either ffmpeg (recommended) or the Berkeley MPEG
encoder (mpeg_encode). If you don't have either, don't worry,
as the options will be hidden and you'll not really miss too
much. Some of the authentication uses openssl MD5 functions,
if you get a grumble about these during configuration all it
will mean is that authentication won't be used for streaming.
The web interface uses PHP and so you need that in your apache
or other web server as well, make sure MySQL support is
available either statically or as a module. There are also
various perl modules that you may need that vary depending on
which options you choose on installation, for more details see
later in this document.
Finally, there is quite a bit of image streaming in the
package. So if you don't have Netscape or another 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.
Hardware-wise, ZoneMinder has been used with various video and
USB cameras with the V4L interface. I don't have a lot of
cameras myself so I've not had change to test it with a huge
range personally however there is a list of devices that are
definitely known to work on the web site. Please let me know
if your camera works and is not listed. You do need to have
Video4Linux installed. I've not got too many machines so I've
only really used it on various RedHat/Fedora distributions,
which seem to have everything there by default I think.
SlackWare does need a bit more tinkering than other
distributions; there is a document on the web site describing
what users have had to do to get it working. Please give me
feedback on other distributions not listed on the site.
3. Components
ZoneMinder is not a single monolithic application but is
formed from several components. These components primarily
include executable compiled binaries which do the main video
processing work, perl scripts which usually perform helper
and/or external interface tasks and php web scripts which are
used for the web interface.
A brief description of each of the principle components
follows.
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, 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 motion which might generate an alarm or event. It
generally keeps up with the Capture daemon but if very busy
may skip some frames to prevent it falling behind.
zmf - This is the ZoneMinder Frame daemon. This is an
optional daemon that can run in concert with the Analysis
daemon and whose function it is to actually write captured
frames to disk. This frees up the Analysis daemon to do
more analysis (!) and so keep up with the Capture daemon
better. If it isn't running or dies then the Analysis
daemon just writes them itself.
zms - This is the ZoneMinder Streaming server. The web
interface connects with this to get real-time or historical
streamed images. It runs only when a live monitor stream or
event stream is actually being viewed and dies when the
event finishes or the associate web page is closed. If you
find you have several zms processes running when nothing is
being viewed then it is likely you need a patch for apache
(see the Troubleshooting section). A non-parsed header
version of zms, called nph-zms, is also installed and may
be used instead depending on your web server configuration.
zmu - This is the ZoneMinder Utility. It's basically a
handy command line interface to several useful functions.
It's 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.
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 controls 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.
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.
zmupdate.pl - Currently this script is responsible for
checking whether a new version of ZoneMinder is available
and other miscellaneous actions related to upgrades and
migrations. It is also intended to be a 'one stop shop' for
any upgrades and will execute everything necessary to
update your installation to a new version.
zmvideo.pl - This script is used from the web interface to
generate video files in various formats in a common way.
You can also use it from the command line in certain
circumstances but this is not usually necessary.
zmx10.pl - This is an optional 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.
For example I have several cameras that don't do motion
detection until I arm my alarm system whereupon they switch
to active mode when an X10 signal is generated by the alarm
system and received by ZoneMinder.
zmtrigger.pl - This is an optional script that is a more
generic solution to external triggering of alarms. It can
handle external connections via either internet socket,
unix socket or file/device interfaces. Currently you have
to configure these using the 'sources' array in the script
itself though ultimately I would expect they would be
databased. The format of triggers used by zmtrigger.pl is
as follows
"<id>|<action>|<score>|<cause>|<text>|<showtext>" where
<20> 'id' is the id number or name of the ZM monitor
<FA> 'action' is 'on', 'off', 'cancel' or 'show' where 'on'
forces an alarm condition on, 'off' forces an alarm condition
off and 'cancel' negates the previous 'on' or 'off'. The
'show' action merely updates some auxiliary text which can
optionally be displayed in the images captured by the monitor.
Ordinarily you would use 'on' and 'cancel', 'off' would tend
to be used to suppress motion based events. Additionally 'on'
and 'off' can take an additional time offset, e.g. on+20 which
automatically 'cancel's the previous action after that number
of seconds.
<FA> 'score' is the score given to the alarm, usually to
indicate it's importance. For 'on' triggers it should be non-
zero, otherwise it should be zero.
<FA> 'cause' is a 32 char max string indicating the reason
for, or source of the alarm e.g. 'Relay 1 open'. Ignored for
'off' or 'cancel' messages
<FA> 'text' is a 256 char max additional info field, currently
not used for anything though anything passed in here will get
saved. Ignored for 'off' or 'cancel' messages.
<FA> 'showtext' is up to 32 characters of text that can be
displayed in the timestamp that is added to images. The 'show'
action is designed to update this text without affecting
alarms but the text is updated, if present, for any of the
actions. This is designed to allow external input to appear on
the images captured, for instance temperature or personnel
identity etc.
Note that multiple messages can be sent at once and should
be LF or CRLF delimited. Without customisation zmtrigger.pl
is of little use, but if you configure it correctly it can
help integrate other systems to generate external triggers
that will cause ZoneMinder events.
zmcontrol-*.pl - These are a set of example scripts which
can be used to control Pan/Tilt/Zoom class cameras. Each
script converts a set of standard parameters used for
camera control into the actual protocol commands sent to
the camera. If you are using a camera control protocol that
is not in the shipped list then you will have to create a
similar script though it can be created entirely separately
from ZoneMinder and does not need to named as these scripts
are. Although the scripts are used to action commands
originated from the web interface they can also be used
directly or from other programs or scripts, for instance to
implement periodic scanning to different presets.
zmtrack.pl - This script is used to manage the experimental
motion tracking feature. It is responsible for detecting
that an alarm is taking place and moving the camera to
point to the alarmed location, and then subsequently
returning it to a defined standby location. As well as
moving the camera it also controls when motion detection is
suspended and restored so that the action of the camera
tracking does not trigger endless further alarms which are
not justified.
zm - This is the (optional) ZoneMinder init script, see
below for details.
4. Building
To build ZoneMinder the first thing you need to do is run the
included configure script to define some initial
configuration, just type
./configure --with-webdir=<your web directory> --with-
cgidir=<your cgi directory>
where --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. If the
script cannot find your MySQL installation, for instance if it
is installed in an unusual location, then --with-mysql
identifies the root directory where you have installed it,
usually /usr. If you want to use real MPEG based streaming you
will need to have built and installed the ffmpeg tools. You
can then also use -with-ffmpeg=<path to ffmpeg root> to help
configure find it if it's not installed in a default location.
Note, you have to make sure you have installed the ffmpeg
headers and libraries rather than just the binaries, or a
development package with them in. Additionally if you have
already built ffmpeg with the mp3lame feature turned on you
may additionally need to tell configure where to find that the
mp3lame library, to prevent unresolved dependencies. To do
this add the -with-lame=<path to lame directory>option as
well. Otherwise ignore this option. 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 on these options.
That's the build configuration sorted out. The next thing you
have to do is do a little more runtime specific configuration.
ZoneMinder configuration 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 asking 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 beforehand. If
you just want to rerun the substitutions you can run
zmconfig.pl in non-interactive mode by typing
perl ./zmconfig.pl -noi
which will just read your file (and later on the database) and
do the substitutions with no questions asked. There are two
classes of options, 'core' options which much be specified
with zmconfig which detail things such as database passwords
which are compiled into ZoneMinder and other options with are
stored in the database and which can be modified dynamically
via the 'options' section of the web interface. You only need
to complete the first set with zmconfig at this stage. If you
want to change just a few options and can't access the options
dialog via the web you can append them as parameters to
zmconfig and it will just ask you about those. So for example,
perl ./zmconfig.pl ZM_STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG
However it is fairly dumb and will not tell you if you make a
typo and misspell an option.
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 user. The included schema
(zmschema.sql) can be used to actually create the tables
required. The database is usually called just 'zm' but can be
anything you like.
If you are a first time user the first run of zmconfig.pl will
warn you about the missing database, you can ignore those
errors this time. Once you've run it for the first time the
schema file should have your desired database name in it so
use it to create the database (see below). Once the database
and permissions are set up rerun zmconfig.pl with the -noi
option to get it to load the configuration into your new
database.
Then just type 'make' to do the build.
5. Installation
For a new installation the next thing you will need to do is
create your database and database users. So type the commands
as follows,
mysql mysql < db/zmschema.sql
mysql mysql
grant select,insert,update,delete on <your database name>.* to
'<username>'@localhost identified by '<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. If you want to
host your database on a different machine than that which
ZoneMinder is running on then use the hostname of the remote
machine instead of localhost.
At this stage typing 'make install' will install everything to
the desired locations, you may wish 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 (and nph-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 already exists.
The 'zm' script does not get installed automatically as it is
not necessary for the operation of the ZoneMinder setup per se
and is not necessarily supported for distributions other than
those from the RedHat or Fedora families. 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
chkconfig --add zm
or similar command for your distribution. 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. You may need to use the '-levels' parameter to
chkconfig to ensure that ZoneMinder is started when you need
it to.
If you are running a distribution which doesn't support the zm
script, or if you just prefer more direct control, you can now
start ZoneMinder by typing
zmpkg.pl start
which, after a few seconds, should return without error. You
can subsequently stop and restart everything by changing the
'start' parameter to 'stop' or 'restart'.
Now fire up your web browser, point it at your zm.php and off
you go.
6. Upgrading
If you are upgrading from a previous version of ZoneMinder you
should follow the build instructions above up to the point
where you run zmconfig.pl. At this point you may wish to make
a backup of your database in case things go wrong, though if
you have a very large database and limited disk space which
may not be feasible. To create a backup type
mysqldump --add-drop-table --databases zm > zm.dump
for a regular dump or
mysqldump --add-drop-table --databases zm | gzip > zm.dump.gz
for a compressed one if you are tight on space. Obviously
change zm to be the name of your database if different. If at
any point during the upgrade something goes wrong and you need
to restore your database you can type the following
mysql < zm.dump
or
gunzip -c zm.dump | mysql
Note, you may need to add parameters to the mysql command in
order to run as a user with appropriate privileges to modify
the database.
The next step is to run zmconfig.pl to set up the
configuration. You can either, just enter the initial basic
configuration manually as before so it can access the
database, or, an easier way if you prefer, you can copy
zmconfig.txt from your previous build directory into the new
build directory and then just run
zmconfig.pl -noi
which will ensure that the key configuration will be imported
though it will not overwrite anything saved in the database.
You can then build ZoneMinder by typing
make
as for a new build.
Assuming your build completes successfully you should ensure
that if ZoneMinder is currently running on your system that it
is shutdown before you go any further. Once it has stopped you
can execute
make install
to install the software.
New versions of ZoneMinder often involve database schema
changes and before you restart it you should make sure that
these changes have been applied.
To do this you must run the zmupdate.pl script. This script is
designed to do all the updating for you; this includes any
database changes plus any other tweaks necessary to upgrade to
the latest version. To use it you should ensure you are logged
in as a user with privileges to run ZoneMinder scripts (this
will usually be root, not necessarily the user you are
building as) and then type
zmupdate.pl -version=<previous version> [--user=<db user> --
pass=<db password>]
where 'previous version' relates to the version of ZM you are
upgrading from, 1.21.1 for example, and not the version you
are upgrading to. All updates from that versions onwards will
be applied; however zmupdate.pl will only work with upgrades
from 1.19.0 onwards. The 'user' and 'pass' options allow you
to specify a database user and password with sufficient
privilege to 'alter' the structure of the database. This is
not necessarily the database user you use for ZoneMinder.
Check that the database upgrade is successful before
continuing.
Once the upgrade process is complete, you can then restart
ZoneMinder using the zmpkg.pl script or using the service
control commands for your distribution. You should check
/var/log/messages and the other ZoneMinder logs for the first
few minutes to ensure that everything comes back up
successfully.
7. Installing from RPM
Installing from the RPM is Distribution specific so make
sure you download the correct RPM for the distribution that
you are using.
All documents including this README are installed to the
systems default document folder.
Fedora Core: /usr/share/doc/zm-{version number}
Mandrake:
The packaged version of Zone Minder installs all binarys to
/usr/lib/zm including the web pages. So don't worry when
you do not see any files installed to the root directory
for your web server. The web pages for Apache are aliased
by zm.conf in the apache/conf.d directory which vary
depending on your distribution:
Fedora Core: /etc/httpd/conf.d/zm.conf
Mandrake:
The Configuration file for setting up the database is
located at /etc/zm.conf and will need to be edited to add
the user and password that you want Zone Minder to use.
After you have installed the Zone Minder package this will
be the first thing you want to do. So use your favourite
editor and add in the user name and password you want Zone
Minder to use. You can also change the database name if you
would like.
vi /etc/zm.conf
Start the mysqld service so you can build the database
service mysqld start
Then run zminit to create the database
/usr/lib/zm/bin/zminit
The user and password that zminit asks for are for the
database only. For the user enter root and leave the
password blank (unless of course you changed the password).
You should see some information showing that it has created
the database and no errors.
Set the run levels for the services that Zone Minder
requires. I like to set the run levels to 3 and 5 with the
following command:
chkconfig -levels 35 mysqld on
chkconfig -levels 35 httpd on
Now start the web server and Zone Minder:
service httpd start
service zm start
You should now be able to access the Zone Minder console
through the web browser http://localhost/zm
Log files will be located in /var/log/zm
Events are located at /var/lib/zm
8. Tutorial
What you see now (and subsequently) depends on whether you
chose to run ZoneMinder in authenticated mode or not. This is
an option that lets you specify whether anyone that goes to
the ZoneMinder web pages must authenticate themselves in order
to be given permissions to perform certain tasks. If you chose
this mode then you will need to log in here. By default a
fully privileged user 'admin' has been created with a password
also of 'admin'. You should change this password as soon as
possible.
Once you've logged in, or if you are running in un-
authenticated mode, you will now 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 an indication of the system
state which will probably say 'stopped' to start with. This is
a link that you can click on to control the ZoneMinder system
as a whole. Below that are various other links including one
detailing the current user (in authenticated mode only) and
one allowing you to configure your bandwidth. This last one
enables you to optimise your settings depending on where you
are, the actual values relating to this are defined in the
options. 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 are
a number of other links that will be covered below.
Please bear in mind that from here on the descriptions of the
web pages are based on what you will see if you are running as
a fully authenticated user. If you are running in un-
authenticated mode or as a less privileged user then some
elements may not be shown or will be disabled.
8.1. Defining Monitors
To use ZoneMinder properly you need to define at least one
Monitor. Essentially, a monitor is associated with a camera
and can 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 use a tool like 'xawtv'
(http://bytesex.org/xawtv/) to get a picture you're happy
with, and to check your camera works. Please note that just
because you can see a video stream in these tools does not
necessarily guarantee that your camera will work with
ZoneMinder. This is because most tools just 'map' the video
image through onto screen memory transparently without
intercepting it, whereas ZoneMinder needs to capture the image
and, usually, inspect it. This is called frame grabbing and to
check it you should use the facility in xawtv, or other tool,
to capture either one or more still images or possibly a
movie. If this works and the images or movie are not garbage
then the chances are that ZoneMinder will work fine also.
Once you have validated your camera run 'zmu -d <device_no> -q
-v' to get a dump of the settings (note, you will have to
additionally supply a username and password to zmu if you are
running in authenticated mode). You can then enter these
values into the video related options of the monitor
configuration panel. The 'device_no' referred to 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 are divided into a set of tabs to make it easier
to edit. You do not have to 'save' to change to different tab
so you can make all the changes you require and then click
'Save' at the end. The individual option are explained in a
little more detail below,
'Monitor' Tab
Name - The name for your monitor. This should be made up
of alphanumeric characters (a-z,A-Z,0-9) and hyphen (-)
and underscore(_) only. Whitespace is not allowed.
Function - This essentially defines what the monitor is
doing. This can be one of the following;
<20> 'None' - The monitor is currently disabled and no streams
can be viewed or events generated.
<FA> 'Monitor' - The monitor will only stream feeds but no
image analysis is done and so no alarms or events will be
generated,
<FA> 'Modect' - or MOtion DEteCTtion. All captured images will
be analysed and events generated where motion is detected.
<FA> 'Record' - In this case continuous events of a fixed
length are generated regardless of motion which is analogous
to a convention time-lapse video recorder. No motion detection
takes place in this mode.
<FA> 'Mocord' - This is a hybrid of Modect and Record and
results in both fixed length events being recorded and also
any motion being highlighted within those events.
<20> 'Nodect' - or No DEteCTtion. This is a special mode
designed to be used with external triggers. In Nodect no
motion detection takes place but events are recorded if
external triggers require it.
Generally speaking it is best to choose 'Monitor' as an
initial setting here..
Section Length - This specifies the length (in seconds) of
any fixed length events produced when the monitor function
is 'Record' or 'Mocord'. Otherwise it is ignored. This
should not be so long that events are difficult to
navigate nor so short that too many events are generated.
A length of between 300 and 900 seconds I recommended.
Frame Skip - This setting also applies only to the
'Record' or 'Mocord' functions and specifies how many
frames should be skipped in the recorded events. The
default setting of zero results in every captured frame
being saved. Using a value of one would mean that one
frame is skipped between each saved, two means that two
frames are skipped between each saved frame etc. An
alternate way of thinking is that one in every 'Frame Skip
+ 1' frames is saved. The point of this is to ensure that
saved events do not take up too much space unnecessarily
whilst still allowing the camera to capture at a fairly
high frame rate. The alternate approach is to limit the
capture frame rate which will obviously affect the rate at
which frames are saved.
Run Mode - Two choices are available here. 'Continuous' is
the usual setting and means that the monitor is expected
to be performing the function selected above at all times
and should one or more of the daemons fail or not be
running it will be automatically restarted. By contrast
'Triggered' means that the decision about whether the
daemons should actually be active is devolved to an
external triggering mechanism.
Triggers - This small section lets you select which
triggers will apply if the run mode has been set to
'triggered' above. The most common trigger is X10 and this
will appear here if you indicated that your system
supported it during installation. Only X10 is supported as
a shipped trigger with ZoneMinder at present but it is
possible that other triggers will become available as
necessary. You can also just use 'cron' jobs or other
mechanisms to actually control the camera and keep them
completely outside of the ZoneMinder settings. The
zmtrigger.pl script is also available to implement custom
external triggering.
Source Type - This determines whether the camera is a
local one attached to a physical video or USB port on your
machine, a remote network camera or an image source that
is represented by a file (for instance periodically
downloaded from a alternate location). Choosing one or the
other affects which set of options are shown in the next
tab.
'Source' Tab (local device)
Device Path/Channel - Enter the full path to the device
file that your camera is attached to, e.g. /dev/video0.
Some video devices, e.g. BTTV cards support multiple
cameras on one device so in this case enter the channel
number in the Channel box or leave it at zero if you're
using a USB camera or one with just one channel.
Device Format - 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.
Capture Palette - Finally for the video part of the
configuration enter the colour depth. ZoneMinder supports
a handful of the most common palettes, so choose one here.
If in doubt try grey first, and then 24 bit colour. If
neither of these work very well then YUV420P or one of the
others probably will. There is a slight performance
penalty when using palettes other than grey or 24 bit
colour as an internal conversion is involved. These other
formats are intended to be supported natively in a future
version but for now if you have the choice choose one of
grey or 24 bit colour.
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 320x240 or
352x288 and then perhaps increasing and seeing how
performance is affected. This size should be adequate in
most cases. Some cameras are quite choosy about the sizes
you can use here so unusual sizes such as 197x333 should
be avoided initially.
Orientation - If your camera is mounted upside down or at
right angles you can use this field to specify a rotation
that is applied to the image as it is captured. This
incurs an additional processing overhead so if possible it
is better to mount your camera the right way round if you
can. If you choose one of the rotation options remember to
switch the height and width fields so that they apply,
e.g. if your camera captures at 352x288 and you choose
'Rotate Right' here then set the height to be 352 and
width to be 288. You can also choose to 'flip' the image
if your camera provides mirrored input.
'Source' Tab (remote device)
Remote Host/Port/Path - 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.home.net, 8192 and
/cameras/camera1.jopg respectively. Leave the port at 80
if there is no special port required. If you require
authentication to access your camera then add this onto
the host name in the form
<username>:<password>@<hostname>.com. This will usually be
24 bit colour even if the image looks black and white.
Remote Image Colours - Specify the amount of colours in
the captured image. Unlike with local cameras changing
this has no controlling effect on the remote camera itself
so ensure that your camera is actually capturing to this
palette beforehand.
Capture Width/Height - As per local devices.
Orientation - As per local devices.
'Source' Tab (file device)
File Path - Enter the full path to the file to be used as
the image source.
File Colours - Specify the amount of colours in the image.
Usually 24 bit colour.
Capture Width/Height - As per local devices.
Orientation - As per local devices.
'Timestamp' Tab
Timestamp Label Format - This relates to the timestamp
that is applied to each frame. It is a 'strftime' style
string. It is actually passed through strftime and then
through printf to add the monitor name so a format of '%%s
- %y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S' (note the double % at the beginning)
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. If
you add a second %%s placeholder in the string this will
be filled by any of the 'show text' detailed in the
zmtriggers.pl section.
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. To place the
timestamp at the bottom of the image use a value eight
less than the image height.
'Buffers' Tab
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 50 is usually ok. If you
find that your system will not let you use the value you
want it is probably because your system has an arbitrary
limit on the size of shared memory that may be used even
though you may have plenty of free memory available. This
limit is usually fairly easy to change, see the
Troubleshooting section for details.
Warm-up 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. The pre-event buffer is a true buffer and
should not really exceed half the ring buffer size.
However the post-event buffer is just a count that is
applied to captured frames and so can be managed more
flexibly. You should also bear in mind the frame rate of
the camera when choosing these values. For instance a
network camera capturing at 1FPS will give you 10 seconds
before and after each event if you chose 10 here. This may
well be too much and pad out events more than necessary.
However a fast video card may capture at 25FPS and you
will want to ensure that this setting enables you to view
a reasonable time frame pre and post event.
Alarm Frame Count - This option allows you to specify how
many consecutive alarm frames must occur before an alarm
event is generated. The usual, and default, value is 1
which implies that any alarm frame will cause or
participate in an event. You can enter any value up to 16
here to eliminate bogus events caused perhaps by screen
flickers or other transients. Values over 3 or 4 are
unlikely to be useful however. Please note that if you
have statistics recording enabled then currently
statistics are not recorded for the first 'Alarm Frame
Count'-1 frames of an event. So if you set this value to 5
then the first 4 frames will be missing statistics whereas
the more usual value of 1 will ensure that all alarm
frames have statistics recorded.
'Misc' Tab
Event Prefix - By default events are named 'Event-<event
id>', however you are free to rename them individually as
you wish. This option lets you modify the event prefix,
the 'Event-' part, to be a value of your choice so that
events are named differently as they are generated. This
allows you to name events according to which monitor
generated them.
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
can be difficult to synchronise two or more different
capture rates precisely. There is a global configuration
option 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
value of 10 here, each image's 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 (usually
down) later if necessary.
Default Scale - If your monitor has been defined with a
particularly large or small image size then you can choose
a default scale here with which to view the monitor so it
is easier or more visible from the web interface.
Web Colour - Some elements of ZoneMinder now use colours
to identify monitors on certain views. You can select
which colour is used for each monitor here. Any
specification that is valid for HTML colours is valid
here, e.g. 'red' or '#ff0000'. A small swatch next to the
input box displays the colour you have chosen.
'Control' Tab
Note: This tab and its options will only appear if you
have selected the ZM_OPT_CONTROL option to indicated that
your system contains cameras which are able to be
controlled via Pan/Tilt/Zoom or other mechanisms. See the
Camera Control section elsewhere in this document for
further details on camera control protocols and methods.
Controllable - Check this box to indicate your camera can
be controlled.
Control Type - Select the control type that is appropriate
for your camera. ZoneMinder ships with a small number of
predefined control protocols which will works with some
cameras without modification but which may have to amended
to function with others, Choose the edit link to create
new control types or to edit the existing ones.
Control Device - This is the device that is used to
control your camera. This will normally be a serial or
similar port. If your camera is a network camera, you will
generally not need to specify a control device.
Control Address - This is the address of your camera. Some
control protocols require that each camera is identified
by a particular, usually numeric id. If your camera uses
addressing then enter the id of your camera here. If your
camera is a network camera then you will usually need to
enter the hostname or IP address of it here. This is
ordinarily the same as that given for the camera itself.
Auto Stop Timeout - Some cameras only support a continuous
mode of movement. For instance you tell the camera to pan
right and then when it is aligned correctly you tell it to
stop. In some cases it is difficult to time this precisely
over a web interface so this option allows you to specify
an automatic timeout where the command will be
automatically stopped. So a value of 0.25 here can tell
the script to stop moving a quarter of a second after
starting. This allows a more precise method of fine
control. If this value is left blank or at zero it will be
ignored, if set then it will be used as the timeout
however it will only be applied for the lower 25% of
possible speed ranges. In other words if your camera has a
pan speed range of 1 to 100 then selecting to move at 26
or over will be assumed to imply that you want a larger
movement that you can control yourself and no timeout will
be applied. Selecting motion at lower speeds will be
interpreted as requiring finer control and the automatic
timeout will be invoked.
Track Motion - This and the following four options are
used with the experimental motion function. This will only
work if your camera supports mapped movement modes where a
point on an image can be mapped to a control command. This
is generally most common on network cameras but can be
replicated to some degree on other cameras that support
relative movement modes. See the Camera Control section
for more details. Check this box to enable motion
tracking.
Track Delay - This is the number of seconds to suspend
motion detection for following any movement that the
camera may make to track motion.
Return Location - If you camera supports a 'home' position
or presets you can choose which preset the camera should
return to after tracking motion.
Return Delay - This is the delay, in seconds, once motion
has stopped being detected, before the camera returns to
any defined return location.
'X10' Tab
Note: This tab and its options will only appear if you
have indicated that your system supports the X10 home
automation protocol during initial system configuration.
X10 Activation String - The contents of this field
determine when a monitor starts and/or stops being active
when running in 'Triggered; mode and with X10 triggers.
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 applies 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. Most columns are also links 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 along with recent events. This is described more fully
below.
Following that are 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 'Monitor', 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. Clicking on
this link will open up a window which allows you to assign
your monitors to groups. These let you select certain monitors
to view. For instance you may only wish to view outdoor
monitors while indoors. You can also choose to view all of
them. If you choose a group then your selection will be
remembered via a cookie and will be used until you change it.
You can call your groups anything you like, though 'Mobile'
has a special meaning (see Mobile Devices below). There may
also be a 'Cycle' link which allows you to cycle through a
shot from each of your monitors (in the selected group unless
they are switched off) and get a streamed or still image from
each in turn. Similarly if you see a link titled 'Montage' it
will allow you view all your active enabled cameras (in the
selected group) 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.
8.2. 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
generated 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.
Name - This is just a label to identify the zone by. You
can change this to be more representative if you like,
though it isn't used much except for logging and
debugging.
Type - This is one of the more important concepts in
ZoneMinder and there are five to choose from.
Active : This is the zone type you'll use most often, and
which will be set for your default zone. This means that
this zone will trigger an alarm on any events that occur
within it that meet the selection criteria.
Inclusive : This zone type can be used 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.
Exclusive : 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.
Preclusive : This zone type is relatively recent. It is
called a Preclusive zone 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 at all. 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 would 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.
Inactive : This final zone type is the opposite of
Active. In this zone type no alarms will ever be
reported. You can 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.
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 do 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.
Units - This setting which details whether certain of the
following settings are in Pixels or Percent, where
'Percent' refers to a percentage area of the zone itself.
In general 'Pixels' is more precise whereas percentages
are easier to use to start with or if you change image
sizes frequently. 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.
Note, the sense of the percentage values changed in
version 1.19.0. Prior to that percentages referred to the
area of the image as a whole, whereas it now only refers
to the area of the zone. This makes trying to work out
necessary sizes rather easier.
Min/Maximum X/Y - 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 in a
Cartesian style.
Alarm Colour - 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 option
is irrelevant for Preclusive and Inactive zones and will
be disabled For Inactive zones all subsequent options are
likewise disabled.
Alarm Check Method -This is a new addition to Zone
definitions. It allows you to specify the nature of the
alarm checking that will take place, and more specifically
what tests are applied to determine whether a frame
represents an alarm or not. The three options are
'AlarmPixels', 'FilteredPixels' and 'Blobs' and depending
on which option is chosen some of the following other
settings may become unavailable. The first of these
indicates that only a count of individual alarmed pixels
should be used to determine the state of a image, the
second indicate that the pixels should be filtered to
remove isolated pixels (see below) before being counted,
and the third uses a more sophisticated analysis which is
designed to aggregate alarmed pixels into continuous
groups, or 'blobs'. Blob analysis is the method ZoneMinder
has always used previously (before it became optional) and
so this is the default. However this method takes slightly
longer and so if you find that one of the other methods
works just as well for you and you wish to maximise
performance you can opt for that instead. Some of the more
useful alarm related features such as highlighted analysis
images are only available with the 'Blob' setting.
Min/Maximum Pixel Threshold - These setting are used to
define limits for the difference in value between a pixel
and its predecessor in the reference image. 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. There is also the option to use a
more sophisticated integer algorithm to calculate a Y (or
brightness) value from the colours themselves.
Min/Maximum Alarmed Area - 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.
Filter Width/Height - To improve detection of valid event
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. These
options are always expressed in pixels and should be
fairly small, and an odd number, three or five is a good
value to choose initially. Application of this filter
removes any tiny or discontinuous pixels that don't form
part of a discrete block.
Min/Maximum Filtered Area - These are two additional
bounds that specify the limits of pixels that would cause
an alarm after this filtering process. As the filtering
process can only remove alarmed 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.
Min/Maximum Blob Area - 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.
Min/Maximum Blobs - Finally the Minimum and Maximum Blobs
settings specify the limits of the actual number of blobs
detected. If an image change satisfies all these
requirements it starts or continues an alarm event.
8.3. 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 recent 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. Also along the top are a handful of other
links. These let you change the scale of the image stream,
modify image settings (for local devices) or close the window.
If you have cameras that can be controlled, a 'Control' link
should also be preset which is described below.
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 'options' 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 frequent 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.
8.4. Controlling Monitors
If you have defined your system as having controllable
monitors and you are looking at a monitor that is configured
for control, then clicking on the 'Control' link along the top
of the window will change the short event listing area to a
control area. The capabilities you have defined earlier
determine exactly what is displayed in this window. Generally
you will have a Pan/Tilt control area along with one or
subsidiary areas such as zoom or focus control to the side. If
you have preset support then these will be near the bottom of
the window. The normal method of controlling the monitor is by
clicking on the appropriate graphics which then send a command
via the control script to the camera itself. This may
sometimes take a noticeable delay before the camera responds.
It is usually the case that the control arrows are sensitive
to where you click on them. If you have a camera that allows
different speeds to be used for panning or zooming etc then
clicking near the point of the arrow will invoke the faster
speed whilst clicking near the base of the arrow will be
slower. If you have defined continuous motion then ongoing
activities can be stopped by clicking on the area between the
arrows, which will either be a graphic in the case of pan/tilt
controls or a word in the case of zoom and focus controls etc.
Certain control capabilities such as mapped motion allow
direct control by clicking on the image itself when used in
browsers which support streamed images directly. Used in this
way you can just click on the area of the image that interests
you and the camera will centre on that spot. You can also use
direct image control for relative motion when the area of the
image you click on defines the direction and the distance away
from the centre of the image determines the speed. As it is
not always very easy to estimate direction near the centre of
the image, the active area does not start until a short
distance away from the centre, resulting in a 'dead' zone in
the middle of the image.
8.5. Filtering Events
The other columns on the main console window contain various
event totals for your monitors 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. Then if you like choose how you want
your results sorted and whether you want to limit the amount
of events displayed.
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.php.net/manual/en/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. However automated filters are run in
perl and so are parsed by the Date::Manip package. Not all
date formats are available in both so if you are saved your
filter to do automatic deletions or other tasks you should
make sure that the date and time format you use is compatible
with both methods. The safest type of format to use is '-3
day' or similar with easily parseable numbers and units are in
English.
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. There are also two
elements, Disk Blocks and Disk Percent which don't directly
relate to the events themselves but to the disk partition on
which the events are stored. These allow you to specify an
amount of disk usage either in blocks or in percentage as
returned by the 'df' command. They relate to the amount of
disk space used and not the amount left free. Once your filter
is specified, clicking 'submit' will filter the events
according to your specification. As the disk based elements
are not event related directly if you create a filter and
include the term 'DiskPercent > 95' then if your current disk
usage is over that amount when you submit the filter then all
events will be listed whereas if it is less then none at all
will. As such the disk related terms will tend to be used
mostly for automatic filters (see below). 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 and mail notifications of events to one or more email
accounts. 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. Finally you can also specify a script which is
run on each matched event. This script should be readable and
executable by your web server user. It will get run once per
event and the relative path to the directory containing the
event in question. Normally this will be of the form
<MonitorName>/<EventId> so from this path you can derive both
the monitor name and event id and perform any action you wish.
Note that arbitrary commands are not allowed to be specified
in the filter, for security the only thing it may contain is
the full path to an executable. What that contains is entirely
up to you however.
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 its 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. Additionally using disk related terms in your filters
means you can automatically create filters that delete the
oldest events when your disk gets full. Be warned however that
if you use this strategy then you should limit the returned
results to the amount of events you want deleted in each pass
until the disk usage is at an acceptable level. If you do not
do this then the first pass when the disk usage is high will
match, and then delete, all events unless you have used other
criteria inside of limits. ZoneMinder ships with a sample
filter already installed, though disabled. The PurgeWhenFull
filter can be used to delete the oldest events when your disk
starts filling up. To use it you should select and load it in
the filter interface, modify it to your requirements, and then
save it making you sure you check the 'Delete Matching Events'
option. This will then run in the background and ensure that
your disk does not fill up with events.
8.6. 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 its 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. In particular you may need to
specify additional, or different, options if you are creating
videos of events with particularly slow frame rates as some
codecs only support certain ranges of frame rates. Details of
these options can be found in the documentation for the
encoders and is outside the scope of this document.
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. 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.
8.7. Options and Users
The final area covered by the tutorial is the options and user
section. If you are running in authenticated mode and don't
have system privileges then you will not see this section at
all and if you are running in un-authenticated mode then no
user section will be displayed.
The various options you can specify are displayed in a tabbed
dialog with each group of options displayed under a different
heading. Each option is displayed with its name, a short
description and the current value. You can also click on the
'?' link following each description to get a fuller
explanation about each option. This is the same as you would
get from zmconfig.pl. A number of option groups have a master
option near the top which enables or disables the whole group
so you should be aware of the state of this before modifying
options and expecting them to make any difference.
If you have changed the value of an option you should then
'save' it. A number of the option groups will then prompt you
to let you know that the option(s) you have changed will
require a system restart. This is not done automatically in
case you will be changing many values in the same session,
however once you have made all of your changes you should
restart ZoneMinder as soon as possible. The reason for this is
that web and some scripts will pick up the new changes
immediately but some of the daemons will still be using the
old values and this can lead to data inconsistency or loss.
One of the options you may notice in the 'System' tab allows
you to specify the default language for your installation of
ZoneMinder. Versions 1.17.0 and later support multiple
languages but rely on users to assist in creating language
files for specific languages. To specify a language you will
have to give the applicable code, thus for UK English this is
en_gb, and for US English it would be en_us, if no language is
given then UK English is assumed. Most languages will be
specified in this nn_mm format and to check which languages
are available look for files named zm_lang_*.php in the
ZoneMinder build directory where the parts represented by the
'*' would be what you would enter as a language. This is
slightly unwieldy and will probably be improved in future to
make it easier to determine language availability. On checking
which languages are available it may be that your preferred
language is not currently included and if this is the case
please consider doing a translation and sending it back to it
may be included in future releases. All the language elements
are given in the zm_lang_en_gb.php file along with a few notes
to help you understand the format.
As mentioned above, you may also see a 'users' tab in the
Options area. In this section you will see a list of the
current users defined on the system. You can also add or
delete users from here. It is recommended you do not delete
the admin user unless you have created another fully
privileged user to take over the same role. Each user is
defined with a name and password (which is hidden) as well as
an enabled setting which you can use to temporarily enable or
disable users, for example a guest user for limited time
access. As well as that there is a language setting that
allows you to define user specific languages. Setting a
language here that is different than the system language will
mean that when that user logs in they will have the web
interface presented in their own language rather than the
system default, if it is available. Specifying a language here
is done in the same way as for the system default language
described above.
There are also five values that define the user permissions,
these are 'Stream', 'Events', 'Control', 'Monitors' and
'System' Each can have values of 'None', 'View' or 'Edit'
apart from 'Stream' which has no 'Edit' setting. These values
cover access to the following areas; 'Stream' defines whether
a user is allowed to view the 'live' video feeds coming from
the cameras. You may wish to allow a user to view historical
events only in which case this setting should be 'none'. The
'Events' setting determines whether a user can view and modify
or delete any retained historical events. The 'Control'
setting allows you to indicate whether the user is able to
control any Pan/Tilt/Zoom type cameras you may have on your
system. The 'Monitors' setting specifies whether a user can
see the current monitor settings and change them. Finally the
'System' setting determines whether a user can view or modify
the system settings as a whole, such as options and users or
controlling the running of the system as a whole. As well as
these settings there is also a 'Bandwidth' setting which can
be used to limit the maximum bandwidth that a user can view at
and a 'Monitor Ids' setting that can be used for non-'System'
users to restrict them to only being able to access streams,
events or monitors for the given monitors ids as a comma
separated list with no spaces. If a user with 'Monitors' edit
privileges is limited to specific monitors here they will not
be able to add or delete monitors but only change the details
of those they have access to. If a user has 'System'
privileges then the 'Monitors Ids' setting is ignored and has
no effect.'
That's pretty much is it for the tour, though there is a lot
more to ZoneMinder as you will discover. You should experiment
with the various setting to get the results you think are
right for your requirements.
9. Camera Control
Version 1.21.0 of ZoneMinder introduced a new feature,
allowing you to control cameras from the web interface and to
some extent automatically. Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras have a
wide range of capabilities and use a large number of different
protocols making any kind of generic control solution
potentially very difficult. To address this ZoneMinder uses
two key approaches to get around this problem.
1) Definition of Capabilities - For each camera model you use,
an entry in the camera capabilities table must be created.
These indicate what functions the camera supports and ensure
that the interface presents only those capabilities that the
camera supports. There are a very large number of capabilities
that may be supported and it is very important that the
entries in this table reflect the actual abilities of the
camera. A small number of example capabilities are included in
ZoneMinder, these can be used 'as is' or modified.
2) Control Scripts - ZoneMinder itself does not generally
provide the ability to send commands to cameras or receive
responses. What it does is mediate motion requests from the
web interface into a standard set of commands which are passed
to a script defined in the control capability. Example scripts
are provided in ZoneMinder which support a number of serial or
network protocols but it is likely that for many cameras new
scripts will have to be created. These can be modelled on the
example ones, or if control commands already exist from other
applications, then the script can just act as a 'glue' layer
between ZoneMinder and those commands.
It should be emphasised that the control and capability
elements of ZoneMinder are not intended to be able to support
every camera out of the box. Some degree of development is
likely to be required for many cameras. This should often be a
relatively straightforward task however if you have a camera
that you want to be supported then please feel free to get in
touch and I should be able to provide an estimate for how much
effort this is likely to be. It is also the case that I have
only been able to access this limited number of cameras to
test against; some other cameras may use different motion
paradigms that don't fit into the control capability/script
architecture that ZoneMinder uses. If you come across any
cameras like this then please forward as much information to
me as possible so that I may be able to extend the ZoneMinder
model to encompass them.
9.1. Control Capabilities
If you have a camera that supports PTZ controls and wish to
use it with ZoneMinder then the first thing you need to do is
ensure that it has an accurate entry in the capabilities
table. To do this you need to go to the Control tab of the
Monitor configuration dialog and select 'Edit' where it is
listed by the Control Type selection box. This will bring up a
new window which lists, with a brief summary, the existing
capabilities. To edit an existing capability to modify select
the Id or Name of the capability in question, or click on the
Add button to add a new control capability. Either of these
approaches will create a new window, in familiar style, with
tabs along the top and forms fields below. In the case of the
capabilities table there are a large number of settings and
tabs, the mean and use of these are briefly explained below.
'Main' Tab
Name - This is the name of the control capability, it will
usually make sense to name capabilities after the camera
model or protocol being used.
Type - Whether the capability uses a local (usually
serial) or network control protocol.
Command - This is the full path to a script or application
that will map the standard set of ZoneMinder control
commands to equivalent control protocol command. This may
be one of the shipped example zmcontrol-*.pl scripts or
something else entirely.
Can Wake - This is the first of the actual capability
definitions. Checking this box indicates that a protocol
command exists to wake up the camera from a sleeping
state.
Can Sleep - The camera can be put to sleep.
Can Reset - The camera can be reset to a previously
defined state.
'Move' Tab
Can Move - The camera is able move, i.e. pan or tilt.
Can Move Diagonally - The camera can move diagonally. Some
devices can move only vertically or horizontally at a
time.
Can Move Mapped - The camera is able internally map a
point on an image to a precise degree of motion to centre
that point in the image.
Can Move Absolute - The camera can move to an absolute
location.
Can Move Relative - The camera can more to a relative
location, e.g. 7 point left or up.
Can Move Continuous - The camera can move continuously in
a defined direction until told to stop or the movement
limits are reached, e.g. left.
'Pan' Tab
Can Pan - The camera can pan, or move horizontally.
Min/Max Pan Range - If the camera supports absolute motion
this is the minimum and maximum pan co-ordinates that may
be specified, e.g. -100 to 100.
Min/Man Pan Step - If the camera supports relative motion,
this is the minimum and maximum amount of movement that
can be specified.
Has Pan Speed - The camera supports specification of pan
speeds.
Min/Max Pan Speed - The minimum and maximum pan speed
supported.
Has Turbo Pan - The camera supports an additional turbo
pan speed.
Turbo Pan Speed - The actual turbo pan speed.
'Tilt' Tab
Definition of Tilt capabilities, fields as for 'Pan' tab.
'Zoom' Tab
Can Zoom - The camera can zoom.
Can Zoom Absolute - The camera can zoom to an absolute
position.
Can Zoom Relative - The camera can zoom to a relative
position.
Can Zoom Continuous - The camera can zoom continuously in
or out until told to stop or the zoom limits are reached.
Min/Max Zoom Range - If the camera supports absolute zoom
this is the minimum and maximum zoom amounts that may be
specified.
Min/Man Zoom Step - If the camera supports relative zoom,
this is the minimum and maximum amount of zoom change that
can be specified.
Has Zoom Speed - The camera supports specification of zoom
speed.
Min/Max Zoom Speed - The minimum and maximum zoom speed
supported.
'Focus' Tab
Definition of Focus capabilities, fields as for 'Zoom'
tab, but with the following additional capability.
Can Auto Focus - The camera can focus automatically.
'White' Tab
Definition of White Balance capabilities, fields as for
'Focus' tab.
'Iris' Tab
Definition of Iris Control capabilities, fields as for
'Focus' tab.
'Presets' Tab
Has Presets - The camera supports preset positions.
Num Presets - How many presets the camera supports. If the
camera supports a huge number of presets then it makes
sense to specify a more reasonable number here, 20 or less
is recommended.
Has Home Preset - The camera has a defined 'home'
position, usually in the mid point of its range.
Can Set Presets - The camera supports setting preset
locations via its control protocol.
9.2. Control Scripts
The second key element to controlling cameras with ZoneMinder
is ensuring that an appropriate control script or application
is present. A small number of sample scripts are included with
ZoneMinder and can be used directly or as the basis for
development. Control scripts are run atomically, that is to
say that one requested action from the web interface results
in one execution of the script and no state information is
maintained. If your protocol requires state information to be
preserved then you should ensure that your scripts do this as
ZoneMinder has no concept of the state of the camera in
control terms.
If you are writing a new control script then you need to
ensure that it supports the parameters that ZoneMinder will
pass to it. If you already have scripts or applications that
control your cameras, the ZoneMinder control script will just
act as glue to convert the parameters passed into a form that
your existing application understands. If you are writing a
script to support a new protocol then you will need to convert
the parameters passed into the script to equivalent protocol
commands. If you have carefully defined your control
capabilities above then you should only expect commands that
correspond to those capabilities.
The standard set of parameters passed to control scripts is
defined below,
--device=<device> - This is the control device from the
monitor definition. Absent if no device is specified.
--address=<address> - This is the control address from the
monitor definition. This will usually be a hostname or ip
address for network cameras or a simple numeric camera id
for other cameras.
--autostop=<timeout> - This indicates whether an automatic
timeout should be applied to 'stop' the given command. It
will only be included for 'continuous' commands, as listed
below, and will be a timeout in decimal seconds, probably
fractional.
--command=<command> - This specifies the command that the
script should execute. Valid commands are given below.
--xcoord=<x>, --ycoord=<y> - This specifies the x and/or y
coordinates for commands which require them. These will
normally be absolute or mapped commands.
--width=<width>, --height=<height> - This specifies the
width and height of the current image, for mapped motion
commands where the coordinates values passed must have a
context.
--speed=<speed> - This specifies the speed that the
command should use, if appropriate.
--panspeed=<speed>, --tiltspeed=<speed> - This indicates
the specific pan and tilt speeds for diagonal movements
which may allow a different motion rate for horizontal and
vertical components.
--step=<step> - This specifies the amount of motion that
the command should use, if appropriate. Normally used for
relative commands only.
--panstep=<step>, --tiltstep=<step> - This indicates the
specific pan and tilt steps for diagonal movements which
may allow a different amount of motion for horizontal and
vertical components.
--preset=<preset> - This specifies the particular preset
that relevant commands should operate on.
The 'command' option listed above may take one of the
following commands as a parameter.
wake - Wake the camera.
sleep - Send the camera to sleep.
reset - Reset the camera.
move_map - Move mapped to a specified location on the
image.
move_pseudo_map - As move_map above. Pseudo-mapped motion
can be used when mapped motion is not supported but
relative motion is in which case mapped motion can be
roughly approximated by careful calibration.
move_abs_<direction> - Move to a specified absolute
location. The direction element gives a hint to the
direction to go but can be omitted. If present it will be
one of 'up', 'down', 'left', 'right', 'upleft', 'upright',
'downleft' or 'downright'.
move_rel_<direction> - Move a specified amount in the
given direction.
move_con_<direction> - Move continuously in the given
direction until told to stop.
move_stop - Stop any motion which may be in progress.
zoom_abs_<direction> - Zoom to a specified absolute zoom
position. The direction element gives a hint to the
direction to go but can be omitted. If present it will be
one of 'tele' or 'wide'.
zoom_rel_<direction> - Zoom a specified amount in the
given direction.
zoom_con_<direction> - Zoom continuously in the given
direction until told to stop.
zoom_stop - Stop any zooming which may be in progress.
focus_auto - Set focusing to be automatic.
focus_man - Set focusing to be manual.
focus_abs_<direction> - Focus to a specified absolute
focus position. The direction element gives a hint to the
direction to go but can be omitted. If present it will be
one of 'near' or 'far'.
focus_rel_<direction> - Focus a specified amount in the
given direction.
focus_con_<direction> - Focus continuously in the given
direction until told to stop.
focus_stop - Stop any focusing which may be in progress.
white_<subcommand> - As per the focus commands, except
that direction may be 'in' or 'out'.
iris_<subcommand> - As per the focus commands, except that
direction may be 'open' or 'close'.
preset_set - Set the given preset to the current location.
preset_goto - Move to the given preset.
preset_home - Move to the 'home' preset.
10. Mobile Devices
ZoneMinder has always had a minimal WML (Wireless Markup
Language) capability to allow it to function on mobile phones
and similar devices. However as of 1.20.0 this is now
deprecated and has been replaced with a new XHTML - Mobile
Profile mode as well as the default HTML4. XHTML-MP is a
small, and limited, version of XHTML intended for mobile
devices and is based on XHTML Basic. It does not contain
scripting or other dynamic elements and essentially is a
subset of HTML as most people know it.
The ZoneMinder XHTML-MP interface allows you to log into your
installation via your phone or mobile devices and perform a
limited number of tasks. These include viewing recent events,
and monitoring live streams. However unlike the full
interfaces these elements are presented as still images
requiring manual refreshing. For now the XHTML-MP interface is
presented as a prototype interface; rather than one offering
full capabilities. As such, please feel free to make comments
or offer suggestions via the forums on
http://www.zoneminder.com.
As well as XHTML-MP, ideally I'd like to be able to offer a
WML2.0 interface. WML2.0 is a blending of WML1.3, which is
traditional WAP, and XHTML. As such it offers the scripting
that WML has traditionally included plus the better control of
mark-up that is the realm of XHTML. Unfortunately so far I'm
unaware of any devices that support WML2.0 even if they say
they are WAP2 compliant, certainly I've never had a phone that
does. If you find out that a particular phone does support
this then please let me know (or better still send me the
phone!).
If you wish to use the XHTML-MP interface to ZoneMinder there
is no extra configuration required to enable it per se.
However ZoneMinder needs to be able to figure out what kind of
content to deliver to particular browsers, so you have two
choices. You can edit zm.php and include a definition that
corresponds to your phone, describing a small number of basic
capabilities, you will see a couple of examples already there,
or you can use the comprehensive open source WURFL package
available from http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/. You will need to
download both the WURFL php files and the wurfl.xml file
itself. WURFL is a resource containing information on the
capabilities of a huge number of mobile phones, devices and
browsers. Thus once it has matched your phone it can determine
various capabilities it may possess. This means that
ZoneMinder itself only has to deal with these capabilities and
not the individual phone types.
To use WURFL you should install the php files in the same
directory as ZoneMinder and then create a 'wurfl' sub-
directory and ensure it is readable and writeable (or
preferably owned by) your web server user. You should put the
wurfl.xml file in there. One other thing you may need to
change, as the xml file is quite large, is the 'memory_limit'
setting in php.ini as the default setting of 8Mb may be too
small. Once you've done this you should find that your phone
or device is recognised and if it can support XHTML-MP it will
receive that interface. If your phone is very new, or you are
using an old version of the XML file you might find that it is
not present however. The WURFL library uses a caching strategy
to avoid reloading the whole XML file each time so check if a
sensible looking cache file has been created in the 'wurfl'
sub-directory also check the wurfl.log in the same place.
The WURFL is a third party application and as such I am unable
to offer support directly for it. If you feel your device is
missing or incorrectly represented please contact the authors
via their own channels. If on the other hand you have any
comments on ZoneMinder on your device specifically please let
me know and I would be pleased to hear about it.
As support for cookies in mobile devices is patchy at best,
the groups feature is not fully implemented in the XHTML-MP
views. Instead if there is a group called 'Mobile' already
defined then that group will always be effective, if not then
all monitors available to the logged in user will be visible,
11. 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 check the ZoneMinder FAQ at
http://www.zoneminder.com/faq.html and then the forums at
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums.html first and see if anyone
has had the same problem in the past. If not then feel free to
get in touch and I'll see if I can suggest something else. .
Please ensure that you read the posting guidelines and go
through the steps listed below before posting or mailing
though. The best places to look for errors are in the system
error log (normally /var/log/messages on RedHat), the
ZoneMinder logs, and the web server log
(/var/log/httpd/error_log unless otherwise defined). There
should be something in one of those that gives you some kind
of tip off.
Some things to check first.
o 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> -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 or the 'options' tab.
o Start simple. Begin with a single monitor and single
zone. You can run the zmc capture daemon from the command line
as 'zmc --device <device>' (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!
o 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. If everything else works but
you can't get images in your browser a likely cause is a
mismatch between where your web server expects to execute CGI
scripts and where you have installed the zms streaming server.
Check your server configuration for the correct CGI location
and ensure you have supplied the same directory to the
ZoneMinder configure script via the -with-cgidir option.
o 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.
o You should be able to use a similar procedure with other
distributions to modify the shared memory pool without kernel
recompilations though in some cases this may be necessary. You
can also sometimes get shared memory errors if you have
changed the monitor image size for instance. In this case it
is sometimes that an old process is hanging onto the shared
memory and will not let it be resized. Ensure that you do a
full ZoneMinder restart and/or manually delete the shared
memory segment to check. Use the ipcs and ipcrm system
commands to check and remove segments if necessary.
o 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 will
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.
o 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. WAR would indicate a warning. You can
prevent this information from being emitted by setting
the ZM_DBG_LEVEL_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
ZM_DBG_PRINT to 1 will output the debug on the console.
You can also use the USR1 and USR2 signals to increase or
decrease the amount of debug being emitted.
o Paths. I admit it, the various paths in ZoneMinder can be
bit of a nightmare mainly because some relate to real
directories and others to web paths. Make sure that they are
all correct and that permissions are such that the various
parts of ZoneMinder can actually run.
o 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. Archive::Zip 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. You can often also install perl modules
via your ordinary package manager, e.g. yum or apt.
o Unsupported palettes. ZoneMinder currently is designed to
use the simple palettes of greyscale and 24 bit as well as now
the YUV420P and some other palettes. 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.
o 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.
o Incorrect libjpeg.a detection. It seems to be the case
that in some cases the library file libjpeg.a is reported as
missing even when apparently present. This appears to actually
be down to the g++ compiler not being installed on the host
system. Since ZoneMinder contains both C++ and C files you
need to be able to compile both of these file types and so
usually need to ensure you have gcc and g++ installed (though
they are often the same binary).
o Httpd and zms memory leaks. It has been reported by some
users with RedHat 9 that the zms process fails to terminate
correctly when the controlled window is killed and also that
it, and it's associated httpd process, continue to grow in
memory size until they kill the system. This appears to be a
bug in early versions of apache 2. On other systems it may
appear that zms is leaking and growing. However what grows is
the total and shared memory size while the non-shared memory
size stays constant. It's a little odd but I think what it
happening is that as zms picks images out of the shared memory
ring buffer to display, as each slot is read the size of that
bit of memory is added to the shared memory total for the
process. As streamed images are not read consecutively it's a
semi-random process so initially most of the buffer slots are
new and the shared memory size grows then as time goes on the
remaining unaccessed slots reduce until once all have been
read the shared memory use caps out at the same size as the
actual segment. This is what I would have expected it to be in
the first place, but it seems to do it incrementally. Then
once this total is hit it grows no further. As it's shared
memory anyway and already in use this apparent leak is not
consuming any more memory than when it started.
o Cambozola. There appears to be an issue with recent
versions of Cambozola that causes image corruption in the
stream. If you are getting this then I suggest you stick with
version 0.22 which is available from the Downloads section of
www.zoneminder.com. You can also switch between using zms or
nph-zms the latter of which supplies non-parsed headers which
should work somewhat better.
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
12. Change Log
12.1. Release 1.21.4
A whole bunch of improvements and fixes.
o FEATURE - The video generation interface has been
redesigned and expanded. This allows you to see what videos
have been generated previously and manage, view or download
them. You can also specify more precisely what input and
output options to pass to ffmpeg and what video formats you
want to support. These options are available from the Options-
>Tools view.
o FEATURE - Historical video is now supported from the
XHTML mobile device interface allowing you to replay previous
events etc.
o FEATURE - A new timeline view has been added. This is an
enhanced graphic activity view that represents events as
colour coded bars on a time based chart. Passing your mouse
over the activity will display images and details from the
events in the chart. You are able to choose whether you see
this view or the traditional events view as a default. Since
this view can be a large file and dynamic loading of event
images can be bandwidth intensive this preference can be
specific on a bandwidth specific basis. The option to switch
between the traditional list and the timeline view is
available at all times however. IMPORTANT NOTE: This view is a
beta version only and due to extensive use of CSS currently
only renders correctly on FireFox type browsers. Even then as
it can use huge numbers of elements it is possible it may
degrade or crash your browser. Specifically Internet Explorer
seems to get totally confused and renders some elements twice
and others in the wrong place etc. I hope to remedy this
situation for the next release but for now using this view
with IE is not recommended.
o FIX - References to the video device files are now
expressed as full file paths rather than just numbers. This
allows files other than /dev/videoX to be used easily.
o FIX - Integration with all versions of ffmpeg, including
CVS, is now supported. At least until the next ffmpeg
interface change anyway!
o FEATURE - Monitors can now use a file path as a video
source. This allows you to use scripts such as wget or other
webcam type applications to generate your images which can
then be fed into ZoneMinder as a monitor and analysed and
archived etc.
o FEATURE - Users can now be defined with a maximum
bandwidth setting. This prevents low privilege users from
swamping the system with lots of high bandwidth streaming.
o FEATURE - Debug levels for the binaries can now be
controlled in a limited fashion from the Options screen. For
more details see the help on the Options->Tools-
>ZM_EXTRA_DEBUG* options.
o FEATURE - The user authentication methods have been
revised to separate authentication at the web front end from
authentication at back end streaming. Thus there are now
several more authentication options to allow more fine
control. The most significant of these ZM_AUTH_TYPE now offers
a choice of 'remote' authentication which allows you to use a
third party authentication scheme such as http basic
authentication and have that users name passed via the
REMOTE_USER environment variable. Providing there is a user of
that name known to ZoneMinder they will be automatically
logged in. Be warned however that there is no facility for
this user to log out so ensure that you do not lock yourself
into a low privilege account. Also you may need to remove user
cookies when you change authentication methods.
o FEATURE - Users now have a 'control' permission which
determines whether they are able to control PTZ style cameras.
As with the other permissions there are three levels, None,
View and Edit. Unlike some of the other options it may not be
obvious what levels do what. The 'None' level bars access to
any control functionality, the 'View' level permits users to
actually control the positioning and settings of a camera
(rather than just look at them which is what might be
expected) and the 'Edit' level allows users to modify the
various control capabilities.
o FIX - A bug was fixed where the streamed images were
using the quality settings for saved files.
o FIX - Jpeg errors are now reported via the generic
ZoneMinder error and debug mechanism rather than just to
standard output as is the default in libjpeg.
o FIX - The time taken to load and refresh the console view
has been reduced. This is especially significant where you may
have lots of monitors.
o FIX - Paths to the control scripts were hard coded with a
full path. This broke the packaged ZoneMinder distributions so
the paths are now relative to the ZM_PATH_BIN config unless
they start with a '/'.
o FIX - The masks used for shared memory have now been
refined to prevent invalid values from causing duplicates.
o FEATURE - Monitors can now be re-ordered from the console
view to allow you to choose how you would like them arranged.
o FEATURE - Motion detection can now be temporarily
disabled from the watch view. This is most useful with PTZ
type cameras where you can switch off motion detection whilst
repositioning the camera. Just don't forget to switch it back
on again afterwards!
o FEATURE - A default scale per bandwidth setting can now
be defined. This allows you to reduce the size of streams etc
on slow connections.
o FEATURE - Monitors can now be defined with a default
scale. This allows you to reduce the viewing size of a monitor
that might be capturing at a large image size. This works in
conjunction with the bandwidth specific scaling so if you
bandwidth setting is 50% and your monitor is also 50% then at
that bandwidth you will be viewing at 25%. This is to ensure
that all monitors maintain relative scaling at all bandwidths.
o FEATURE - The choice of streaming versus stills views as
default can now be specified per bandwidth setting.
o FEATURE - In the past there has been some confusion about
what the 'prev' and 'next' options do when scrolling through
events. They actually move to the previous or next event in
the list from which the event was selected rather than in
chronological order. Previously this order was descending
date/time in most cases meaning that the previous event would
be one that occurred after the current event. In order to
prevent this confusion and allow users to define a default
order which they prefer there are now two more options in
Options->System called ZM_EVENT_SORT_FIELD and
ZM_EVENT_SORT_ORDER which allow you to choose your own sort
type and order. The default for these is now date/time
ascending meaning oldest first which is opposite to the
previous default and you will need to update these options to
retain the previous behaviour. Note also that this ordering
applies only to event lists and not the 'last x events' in the
watch window which are still newest first.
o FIX - A curious problem with logging in on PHP 4.4 has
now been fixed.
o FEATURE - Following requests and some confusion about how
often filters are executed versus reloaded from the database,
this is now a configurable options (Options->System->
ZM_FILTER_EXECUTE_INTERVAL). Please read the help on this
option for guidance on what values to use.
o FEATURE - A 'Filters' button has been added to the main
console view allowing easier access to the filters view.
o FEATURE - Support for the HTTPS protocol has been added
allowing streaming etc to function over secure links.
o FEATURE - The layout and functionality of the XHTML
screens has been enhanced to make them more useful overall.
o FEATURE - Following virtual extinction of donations I
have added a small one time nag screen which invites you to
donate to ZoneMinder after a month of use. That's all it does
and once dismissed you will never see it again!
o LANGUAGE - A lot of new tokens have been added. These
have been included in all the language files in English. It
would be appreciated if anyone who is able to edit their
zm_lang_xx_yy.php language files and translate these tokens
could email them back to me so I can include them in future
releases.
12.2. Release 1.21.3
Additional bug fix release.
o FIX - Images from rotated monitors had been broken in a
previous release. This has been corrected.
o FIX - The bogus deletion of events by zmaudit has finally
been completely fixed.
o FIX - Fixed a problem where Axis PTZ controls sometimes
caused the camera to move in an incorrect direction.
o FIX - Fixed an issue where the 'goto preset' command did
not pass the appropriate preset number (and so defaulted to 1)
for the Axis, Panasonic and VISCA protocols.
o FIX - A problem existed where renaming monitors did not
rename the symbolic link to the events directory. Thanks to
forum user 'tommy' for suggesting the fix to this issue.
o FIX - The README document has been restructured slightly
to make it easier to find the information you require. This
includes the addition of an Upgrading section to clarify the
process of upgrading from a previous version.
12.3. Release 1.21.2
Minor-ish bug fixes to the 1.21.1 release.
o FIX - If the defined image timestamp format for a monitor
contained only time directives and no %%s directives then the
timestamp was not included in the image at all.
o FIX - An ugly divide by zero error was present on new
installations where no monitors had yet been defined.
o FIX - The Pelco-D protocol control script did not
properly support Iris control.
o FIX - Fixed a nasty problem in zmaudit which meant that
older events sometimes didn't get tidied up and deleted
properly.
o FIX - Fixed an issue with the multi-part jpeg streams
having frame boundaries output at the end of each image and
not the beginning. Apart from this not being ideal
semantically it also meant that ZM had trouble parsing it's
own output!
o FEATURE - Some of the scripts have a new debug format
that is more similar to the one used in the binaries.
12.4. Release 1.21.1
Menage of various new features and bug fixes.
o FIX - The HTTP refresh method of updating the Cycle view
was broken. This is now fixed.
o FIX - There was an arbitrary limit on the size of a blob
due to the dimensioning of the field in the database. This has
been increased to allow all possible blob sizes to be
accounted for.
o FIX - On some platforms there is no definition of the
'round' function. Previous versions of ZM have detected this
and included one if no other is present. However changes in
1.21.0 meant that this did not always happen and the function
went undefined. This has been corrected.
o FEATURE - Support has been added to allow monitors to be
defined as mirrored. Thus images can now be flipped
horizontally or vertically before processing as well as
rotated as in previous versions.
o FIX - Made the 'Options' link only appear if the user has
sufficient permissions.
o FIX - Fixed issue where the PTZ control function to set
camera presets never passed the preset number so preset 1 was
always used.
o FEATURE - A custom title can now be added via the normal
Options dialog (ZM_WEB_TITLE_PREFIX). This title will be used
in all browser windows and allows you to distinguish between
multiple ZM installations for example.
o FEATURE - Ordinarily ZoneMinder will resize the console
window to fit the number of monitors displayed. If you are
using a tabbed browser this can be a little irritating. A new
option (ZM_WEB_RESIZE_CONSOLE) has been added to control this
behaviour.
o FEATURE - Version 1.21.0 added support for events to be
labelled with Cause and Notes fields. However these could not
be modified directly from the web interface. This has been
amended so that an 'Edit' link is now present in the events
listing. Clicking on this allows you to modify these fields
for one or more events so they can be identified as belonging
to a particular incident.
o FEATURE - There has long been a dichotomy between the
functions that can be applied via interactive filters versus
background saved filters. This release addresses this to some
extent allowing you, for instance, to archive or unarchive
matching events, or edit them as described above. This is not
a complete solution and it is expected that the functionality
will converge further in the future.
o FEATURE - Previously in the c/c++ code accessor functions
had to be called to access the value of configuration options.
This was expensive when done repeatedly so some classes used
cached local variables to avoid this. The configuration has
been rewritten to provide all configuration options as members
of the configuration class which are initialised once on
startup and then can be accessed directly with no further
overhead.
o LANGUAGE - Support for the Danish language has now been
included. Thanks for forum user 'voronwe' for his work on
this. Select dk_dk in the languages preferences to use this
language.
o FEATURE - Events viewed in the events listing view can
now be saved locally by clicking on the 'Export' button. This
creates a tar or zip file of the selected file groups, such as
images, videos etc, as well as, optional, HTML pages
describing the basic details about the event and frame
details. This allows a basic navigation and viewing of the
events outside of the regular ZoneMinder interface. This
format is different, and improved, over that that created in
the background filter function and it is expected that these
functions will converge at some point.
o FIX - Clearing the 'Track Motion' checkbox in the Control
section of the Monitor configuration would not be saved
resulting in this setting being stuck in an 'on' state. This
has been corrected.
o FIX - The 'Play All' link in the event view allows a
sequence of events to be streamed consecutively. This is fine
in a streamed view but meaningless in the stills view so has
been removed.
o FEATURE - The 'show' trigger command in zmtrigger.pl has
been added to allow miscellaneous externally sourced text to
be displayed in the image timestamps.
o FEATURE - Add the 'Auto Stop Timeout' monitor control
option to allow finer control of Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras with
support for only basic continuous modes of motion.
o LANGUAGE - The German language files have been updated.
o FEATURE - Support for control of Axis network cameras has
been added. This uses the zmcontrol-axis-v2.pl script and
should work with all Axis PTZ network cameras that use version
2 of the Axis API.
o FEATURE - The zmaudit.pl script has been modified to be
faster and access disk a lot less. Previously it was possible
for this script to frequently thrash disks while determining
timestamps on directories.
o FEATURE - A contributed patch by Ross Melin has been
included. This gives you the option of using an alternative
mailing method in the zmfilter.pl script if the default method
does not work correctly. To use the new method go to Options-
>Email and set ZM_NEW_MAIL_MODULES to on.
o FIX - Previously the ZM_EMAIL_HOST config was not passed
to the zmfilter.pl script so hosts other than localhost were
not used. This has been fixed.
o LANGUAGE - A translation for the Romanian language has
been added. To use it select ro_ro as the language.
o FIX - In previous versions the path to the zms daemon
from web pages was in the form of a local web path without
hostname. This has been reported as not working with certain
media players where the hostname is not implied, as with
browsers. The paths to the streaming server now always have
the hostname prepended so that they are always a full valid
url.
o FIX - Monitors that are inactive no longer have an active
link for streaming as this has no real purpose.
o FEATURE - An experimental Pelco-P control script has been
added to support PTZ cameras that support this protocol. This
script has not really been tested but is included as a basis
for further development or customisation.
o FIX - The zmfilter.pl script now respects the
ZM_FAST_DELETE option and will fully delete any events rather
than assuming that zmaudit.pl will clear up if it just removes
the primary database record.
o FIX - The montage view layout now correctly utilises the
ZM_MAX_MONTAGE_COLS option when determining the dimensions and
layout of the montage window.
o FEATURE - A contributed patch by forum user 'lazyleopard'
has been included. This allows a specified number of frames to
be discarded to alleviate problems with broken interlaced
frames where multiple cameras share one bttv chip and produce
a 'comb edge' like image. To invoke this option go to Options-
>Config and set ZM_CAPTURES_PER_FRAME to greater than 1, a
value of 3 is recommended in the first instance.
o FEATURE - Several users have reported problems using the
Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library, mostly to
do with it not being found or an incorrect version being used.
This version allows an alternative method of parsing the
output from network cameras that does not depend on libpcre at
all. Which method is used is controlled by the option Options-
>Network->ZM_NETCAM_REGEXPS. If this option is on then the
traditional regular expression based parsing is implemented,
provided you have built with libpcre. If the option is off or
libpcre is missing then a more basic parsing is used instead.
This new method should be slightly faster as it does not have
the overhead of regular expression parsing, however this also
makes it slightly more inflexible. If you experience problems
using the new method with your netcam then you should try
switching to the regular expression based method, and report
the issue via the forums, preferably with a snapshot of the
output of your camera.
12.5. Release 1.21.0
Addition of camera control, plus several bugfixes.
o FEATURE - Added support for Pan/Tilt/Zoom and general
camera control.
o FIX - The montage view layout has been modified to allow
better dynamic layout of windows. Views should now be laid out
in a more logical arrangement. This is a relatively temporary
change and the montage view will shortly be rewritten to use
flowing 'div' tags which should add more flexibility and be
less complex.
o FIX - All stream views now have an 'alt' tag to highlight
which monitor they should be displaying.
o FIX - Detection of which markup language to use, HTML or
XHTML-MP has now been optimised to ensure theat the test only
happens once per session.
o FIX - Some constants were defined unquoted, this has now
been corrected.
o FIX - The zmtrigger.pl script had an old, and incorrect,
initial section using constants that were no longer valid.
This has now been fixed.
o FIX - The regular expression patterns used to parse the
zm.conf file have been modified to ensure that they should
always work.
o FIX - In previous versions it was possible for a process
to die and not be reaped by zmdc.pl. This could have resulted
in processes remaining as zombies resulting in them not being
restarted after crashing. This has now been fixed so all dying
processes will be caught and handled.
o FIX - The frame view has been restructured to ensure that
it has a consistent look and does not display unwanted
wrapping.
o FIX - A couple of remnant hard coded text elements have
been replaced with tokens as they should have been originally.
o FIX - Previously separate 'object' and 'embed' tags were
used for Internet Explorer and non-IE browsers. These have
been merged so that browsers will use whichever tag is
appropriate. Any player controls that were present should now
be hidden as well.
o FIX - A problem was present whereby the Maximum FPS set
in the bandwidth settings was not being respected in the live
streams. This is now fixed.
o FIX - If users were created with restricted monitor ids,
it was sometimes possible that permission errors would still
be issued if they tried to view streams or other elements
associated with monitors in their list. This has now been
corrected such that any restrictions are applied correctly.
o FIX - Users created with only 'view streams' permissions
were presented with a 'permission denied' error in the area of
the Watch window normally containing the recent events list.
Whilst this was technically correct it was unnecessary and
untidy, and has now been changed just to be blank.
12.6. Release 1.20.1
Mostly bug fixes, large and small with a couple of minor
features included.
o FIX - A dependency on the regular expression library was
introduced in 1.20.0 which caused some people to have build
problems. This library has traditionally been is necessary to
support network cameras but not otherwise. This situation has
now been restored.
o FEATURE - Added ZM_RAND_STREAM option. This option adds a
time code onto the url of each stream to prevent it from being
cached which had caused some broken image problems with some
browsers, notably Mozilla.
o FIX - Made zms check ZM_OPT_AUTH before loading user
details. This should have been in there in 1.20.0 but was
omitted and should fix the issue where streams did not work
with authentication off.
o FIX - There was some debug code left behind in
zm_xhtml.php. This was unnecessary and has been removed.
o FIX - Fixed user sql, added debug and wrapped in check
for libcrypto in zm_user.cpp. This should correct bogus
loading of user data which may have affected some people. You
can also now just bump up the debug level to see what the auth
strings being used are.
o FIX - The xHTML console page now uses the mobile group as
it should have in 1.20.0
o FIX - Modified database username to be binary. You need
to run the zmalter-1.20.0 sql script as usual to change your
Users table to disallow case-insensitive checking which may
have been breaking some people's streams.
o FIX - Fixed incorrect constant definitions in
zmtrigger.pl. This script had not been updated along with the
other scripts.
o FIX - Fixed bogus double .jpg suffix on diagnostic
images, also included them (if they exist) in frame view.
o FIX - Corrected broken check for libcrypto (the check
happened before any definition) causing build problems for
some people who do not have MD5 library installed.
o FIX - Added permissions mode to mkdir in zm_actions.php
to remove php warning.
o FIX - Added space before -m in zmu command in
zm_actions.php
o FIX - Added quotes around brightness etc SQL in
zm_actions.php to avoid errors when values are empty.
o FIX - Added line length to fgets in zm_config.php.z to
prevent php warning
o FIX - Slightly enlarged a couple of window sizes in
zm_config.php.z to work better with different browsers.
o FIX - Defined empty array in html_view_states to prevent
php warnings.
o FEATURE - Console window now sizes itself according to
how many monitors in list, though there is a minimum size.
o FIX - Corrected bug in zmfilter.pl.z which meant that
images were not always correctly uploaded.
12.7. Release 1.20.0
Improved and added features, several minor bug fixes.
o FEATURE - Certain configuration (Mostly database
settings) is now stored in a new file zm.conf. This means that
database access settings can be changed without recompilation.
It also allows the creation of ZoneMinder rpms. Watch
zoneminder.com for details. Thanks for forum user 'oskin' for
his work on this.
o FEATURE - The WML interface is now deprecated and the
XHTML-MP interface is the new supported interface for mobile
devices.
o FEATURE - Monitor groups have now been added allowing
subsets of monitors to be viewed independently.
o FEATURE - A generic external triggering interface has
been included via the zmtrigger.pl script. A new monitor
function 'Nodect' has been added to support this.
o FEATURE - Interaction between the web pages and the
streaming daemons and other utilities has previously been not
as secure as it could have been and open to possible abuse.
This has now been addressed and zms and zmu both now use
(optional) authentication strings to validate access. You need
to have openssl installed so that the MD5 libraries can be
linked. See the ZM_AUTH_METHOD and ZM_AUTH_SECRET
configuration items for further details.
o FEATURE - The maximum daemon restart delay in zmdc.pl was
previously fixed at 15 minutes. This may have been too long
for some users, for example if power has failed to a camera
then a 15 minute delay on restoration is not desirable. This
maximum is now configurable via the ZM_MAX_RESTART_DELAY
configuration item.
o FEATURE - The web files have been changed to use the
newer style autoglobals, e.g. $_SERVER rather than
$HTTP_SERVER_VARS. This should enable use on PHP5 without any
modification.
o FIX - The use of two database users has been somewhat
redundant for a number of versions now. In 1.20.0 there is
only one database user. The zmupdate.pl script unfortunately
cannot handle the migration as it needs to access the database
so you should make a note of the username and password of the
privileged user and then re-enter that using zmconfig.pl when
rebuilding ZM.
o FIX - The zmupdate.pl script previously held a database
connection open for days at a time but only used to use it
periodically. This has now been changed to be only open while
in use.
o FIX - Debug output and it's relationship with environment
variables etc was previously broken. This has been tidied up
and made much easier to use and understand.
o FIX - A number of SQL queries have been analysed and
optimised to run much faster.
o FIX - The monitor status was not always being reported
correctly in the monitor watch window. This has been
corrected.
o FIX - Image numbering in the zmf daemon was sometimes
wrong if more or less than three significant digits were used.
This has been corrected.
o FIX - Image capture timeouts used by zmwatch.pl to
restart apparently frozen zmc processes were being calculated
incorrectly on occasion. This was causing some unnecessary
processes to be restarted. This calculation has been fixed.
o FIX - Complete DOCTYPE headers were added to HTML output
and some HTML was tidied up to be more compliant.
o FIX - There was a problem with the interaction between
monitor statuses and the status web window. This meant that
sometimes the window did not pop to the front, or play the
alarm sound, properly. This has been corrected.
o FIX - Some network cameras send data in a format which
was previously not recognised by the regular expression
engine. This has been modified to allow these cameras (NC1000
etc) to function with ZoneMinder.
o FIX - A bug in event streaming when events are of very
short duration has been fixed. Thanks to forum user 'reza' for
spotting this one.
o FIX - A possible exploit in the login page was identified
and has now been fixed. Thanks again to forum user 'reza'
highlighting this problem also.
12.8. Release 1.19.5
Various miscellaneous fixes and features.
o FIX - Sorting event lists by duration was broken and has
now been corrected.
o FEATURE - The zmfix utility previous corrected file
permissions on video device files only. This has been modified
to do likewise to the X10 device serial port if enabled.
o FIX - The modification suggested by forum user 'oskin'
has been incorporated into the code to try and reduce or
remove video for linux errors.
o FIX - The remote network camera parsing code has been
patched to try
o FIX - The error reported when a 'shmget' call fails has
been changed to include further information about the cause.
o LANGUAGE - Fixed missing semicolon in German language
file.
o FEATURE - Added '<<' and '>>' links to the page selector
in the events list as suggested by forum user 'unclerichy'.
o FEATURE - Brightness, colour, hue and contrast are now
saved persistently for a monitor rather than being reset each
time the system is restarted. This feature is based on a patch
submitted by forum user 'oskin'.
o FEATURE - In previous versions the events folder has been
keyed by the monitor name. This has caused problems in the
past with various characters appearing which are legal in
names but not in filesystems. From this version all files
related to monitors are keyed on the monitor id rather than
the name. To help you navigate through these files the monitor
name still exists but as a link only. Please ensure you run
zmupdate.pl to update your events directory.
o FEATURE - You may now optionally have thumbnail images in
your event lists. To enable this functionality set
ZM_WEB_LIST_THUMBS on in Options->Web. You can also control
the width or height of these thumbnails but should only set
one dimension only and leave the other blank or zero.
o FEATURE - You can now specify how many image thumbnails
appear across and down the page in the event stills listing.
In Options->Web set the ZM_WEB_FRAMES_PER_LINE and/or
ZM_WEB_FRAME_LINES options.
o FEATURE - ZoneMinder uses ffmpeg
(http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/) for video generation and
processing. Recently a new version (0.4.9-pre1) was released
which changed the interface that ZoneMinder uses and so broke
compilation. This version will detect which version of ffmpeg
you have and compile accordingly.
o FEATURE - You can now specify a prefix for events
generated by particular monitors. This will replace the
default 'Event-' one.
o FEATURE - If you use filters to send event notification
emails you can now have them sent in HTML format. This is done
automatically if your mail body includes a '<html>' token,
o FEATURE - An experimental feature has been added which
lets you view several events in sequence. In event listing you
can check the events you want to view and then click the
'View' button. This will allow you to navigate through only
those events in the normal manner (via Prev and Next links)
but also to view them in sequence by clicking on the 'Play
All' link. This will replay each event and then automatically
move onto the next one. You can stop this progression at any
time by pressing 'Stop' (which only stops the sequence and not
the currently playing event). The timing of the replay is done
depending on the calculated length of the event (plus one
second) and so may not exactly correspond to the real event
length. In particular this is unlikely to work if replaying
events using MPEG video and buffering players as the timing
will likely be incorrect. If you are viewing an event but
haven't checked any in the list the 'Play All' button will
just work down the current event list.
o FIX - A default php error level excluding notice warnings
is now explicitly set.
o FEATURE - Previously events have been created even if
only one frame has generated an alarm. This has not always
been desirable as sometimes glitches and flickers create large
numbers of events, however no mechanism existed for limiting
this. In this version you can now specify the minimum number
of consecutive alarmed frames that are necessary to create an
event. This is the 'Alarm Frame Count' described above. Note
that if an alarm is in progress single isolated alarmed frames
will still prolong it and the count only applies to the
initial frames that would cause the event.
12.9. Release 1.19.4
Language fixes and updates.
o FIX - The US English language file was recursively
including itself rather than the UK English file as the base
language.
o LANGUAGE - The Brazilian Portuguese language file
detailed in the previous release has actually been included in
this one.
o LANGUAGE - The Argentinian Spanish, Polish and Italian
translations have all been updated with tokens introduced in
version 1.19.3.
12.10. Release 1.19.3
Minor tweaks, fixes and language updates.
o FEATURE - All stills views now use the single image mode
of zms rather than spawning off a zmu process to write an
image which is then read. This reduces complexity of double
buffering significantly and also reduces the chance of errors
caused by multiple simultaneous image generation.
o FEATURE - The generated MIME types when creating streamed
video were previously assigned by zms depending on which of a
limited number of output formats was specified. This has now
been changed so that the ffmpeg libavformat library itself now
generates these identifiers. The consequence of this is that
many more video formats supported by your version of ffmpeg
should now be available via zms.
o FEATURE - When viewing a single frame of an event you can
select a 'stats' link to view the statistics that apply to
that frame, if you have the RECORD_EVENT_STATS option switched
on. This can be used to help configure your zones for optimal
motion detection. Previously only pixel count values were
displayed here which made it difficult to configure zones
configured in percentage terms. These values are now displayed
in both pixel and percentage terms to assist in zone
configuration. Note that the percentage values are based on
the current size of the zone so if this is changed then the
value displayed will not be applicable at the time of event
generation.
o FIX - When doing motion detection an extra blob, that
could never be removed, was sometimes included. This could
have caused false triggering and has not been corrected.
o FIX - A problem was reported whereby when using bulk
frame records to reduce database load the last frame record
was not written. Replaying the event via the web interface
resulting in the event being truncated. A correction has been
made so prevent this and ensure that the last frame of an
event is always recorded.
o FIX - If an analysis daemon terminates abnormally or the
host computer crashes then events can be left in a state
whereby they effectively have zero length and are useless. A
change to zmaudit.pl was made such that any 'open' events such
as this which have not been updated for at least five minutes
are closed and updated to reflect their actual content so that
they may be viewed or saved. Events recovered in this way are
named with a '(r)' mark to help identify them.
o FIX - In more recent versions of MySQL the password hash
generated is 50 characters long, which overflows the previous
password field in the database which was only 32 characters
long. This field has been extended to 64 characters to
accommodate this.
o FIX - The montage view had an error whereby the refresh
timeout for stills was mislabelled causing continuous refresh
attempts which rendered the view mostly unusable. The
constants in question are now correctly referenced.
o FIX - The default, bandwidth specific, rate and scales
were not always used as the records in the database were
misnamed. This is now corrected though you may need to reset
the values that were used previously as these will be lost if
they had been changed.
o FIX - It was previously the case that old images could be
left in the 'images' directory for a long period, sometimes
resulting in incorrectly assuming correct operation. A fix was
made to zmaudit.pl which modified the previous clean up of old
WAP images so that any old images left in this directory are
removed after a short period. Please ensure that if you have
customised the web interface and have images you wish to keep
that they are not left in the temporary images folder as they
will now be deleted.
o FIX - A JavaScript error in the Zone configuration screen
was identified and fixed.
o LANGUAGE - A Brazilian Portuguese translation has been
supplied by Victor Diago and is available by selecting 'pt_br'
as the language type.
o LANGUAGE - Updated versions of the Dutch and Argentinian
Spanish translations have been included.
12.11. Release 1.19.2
Minor features, fixes and language updates.
o FEATURE - The default replay rate and live and event
scale settings are now configurable on a per bandwidth basis
rather than globally. This allows you to view at full scale
when you have high bandwidth and at smaller scales when you do
not have so much resource. You will need to re-configure your
previous defaults as they will be lost.
o FEATURE - Filters can now include a specification of the
preferred sort order of the results.
o FEATURE - Filters can now include a specification to
limit the results to a predefined maximum
o FEATURE - Two new filter elements have been added. These
are disk blocks and disk percentage. These are event
independent and return the amount of disk space used on the
event partition in terms of disk blocks or percentage as
returned by df(1). Thus filters using these criteria will
either match all events or none at all depending on the disk
usage at the time of filter execution. The addition of these
terms along with the ability to sort and limit filter results
now means it is possible to create a filter that will
automatically clear out old events once disk usage exceeds a
certain value. Included in the database schemas for both new
installations and upgrades is a sample filter called
PurgeWhenFull which can be used to do this. It is initially
not set to do anything automatically so if you want to use it,
you should load it into the filter selection window, modify it
to your taste and then save it, selecting 'auto delete'.
Please note that filters created using disk related terms to
delete events should always contain a limit term also
otherwise it is possible for all events to match and thus be
deleted. Using a limit ensures that only a small number are
affected at any one time.
o FEATURE - Filters can now be defined to automatically
execute an external script or program of your choosing. This
can be specified when the filter is saved. Note that for
security reasons this cannot be just any arbitrary command but
must be readable and executable by your web server effective
user. The script or program you specify here will be executed
in the events root directory once for each event and will be
passed one parameter containing the relative path to the event
directory. This will normally be of the form
<MonitorName>/<EventId> so it it possible to determine both
the monitor and event in question from the path. Note also
that a flag is set per event as with other auto actions
indicating that an executable script has been run on that
event and so to exclude it from subsequent matches. However if
you have several filters all with executable scripts you will
find that only the first gets executed as the flag will be set
following successful completion and so no further scripts will
be run on that event. Successful completion is indicated by
the script returning a zero exit status, any other status
indicates an error and the executed flag will not be set.
o FIX - In some circumstances temporary diagnostic images
were being saved instead of highlighted analysis images. This
is now corrected.
o FIX - When viewing a list of frames in an event, the link
to the diagnostic image was incorrect. This is now fixed.
o FIX - The Archive link from the monitor watch window has
been fixed. Previously this generated a bogus window.
o FIX - The zone definition have been updated so that
selecting the various types of zones etc only disables those
options you no longer have access to rather than wiping them
out entirely. This is also true of the zone when saved. Thus
you can now more easily change a zone to be temporarily
inactive for example and have your previous active settings
restored in the future.
o FIX - Selecting an event from the list generated by a
filter that included a Monitor Name term did not previously
work properly. This is now fixed.
o FIX - A number of the constants used internally have been
renamed to be more consistent. Hopefully nothing is broken!
o FIX - Following notification of a potential vulnerability
in zms by Mark Cox, all non-trivial string and buffer copies
are now limited by the maximum size of the destination. Mark
has also askedme to include the following notice relating to
this, which I am very happy to do.
"This issue was discovered by Mark J Cox
<mark@awe.com>. The Common
Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org)
has assigned the
name CAN-2004-0227 to this issue."
o LANGUAGE - An additional Italian language translation has
been added. One, by Davide Morelli, was included in 1.19.1 but
not announced. However like buses another one has come along,
from Tolmino Muccitelli, and so they are both now present. The
original translation is accessible by selecting it_it as the
language whereas the new one is it_it2. I would prefer if they
were merged as two versions of one language is not easy to
maintain when I don't know what the differences mean!
o LANGUAGE - A version of Argentinian Spanish by Fernando
Diaz has also been included and is accessible by setting your
language to es_ar. As with all the language translations I
cannot vouch for the completeness or accuracy of the language
files so feel free to feedback any updates you think should be
made.
o NOTE - None of the non-English language files in this
release do not contain any translations of the new, or
modified, tokens which have been introduced in this release.
All new or modified tokens are included in the language files
in English. There will shortly be a point release which
includes these language updates assuming I can get
translations of them in a reasonable timescale.
12.12. Release 1.19.1
Minor bugfixes and enhancements.
o Ffmpeg Configure Changes. The configure script has been
modified to look for the ffmpeg libraries in their installed
location rather than in a build directory. This is to avoid
having to build the library when it might already be
installed.
o Pcre Configure Changes. The configure script has been
modified to look for the pcre.h header file in both
/usr/include and /usr/include/pcre rather than just the latter
as previously.
o Remote Image Parsing. Further improvements have been made
to handle additional patterns of images with differing styles
of terminations or none at all.
o Event Image Numbering. An additional configuration option
(ZM_EVENT_IMAGE_DIGITS) has been added to allow the user to
define how many significant figures should be used to number
individual event images.
o Frame Listing Timestamp Bug. Fixed a bug where in the
event frame listing view the timestamps were not correctly
displayed.
o Event Filters Bug. Fixed (again) a bug where several
fields used in event filters did not generate valid database
queries.
o Zmu Device Authentication. Removed the previous
requirement to pass in a username and password to zmu when
just querying a device as this was slightly broken and was
unnecessary anyway.
12.13. Release 1.19.0
Some major enhancements and bugfixes.
o MPEG video streaming. ZoneMinder now supports true video
streaming if configured with the -with-ffmpeg option. This
allows one or both of live or event streaming to be in this
format rather than motion JPEG style as before. Note however
that is still somewhat experimental and may not work on your
system. The reason for this is due to the variation in plugins
and video movie formats. Currently I have got it working well
with browsers on Windows platforms using the Windows Media
Player plugin and the 'asf' video format. I have also managed
to get event streaming working on Mozilla using mplayer (I
think) though it jumps in and out of it's place in the window
a bit. I would appreciate any feedback or advice on formats
and plugins that work on your system. Also note that video
streaming tends to get buffered before being displayed. This
can result in the 'live' view being several seconds delayed.
o Motion JPEG Capture. Previously image capture from
network devices has been limited to single stills capture
only. This has now changed and if you entered a remote camera
path that returns the multipart/x-mixed-replace MIME type then
this will be parsed and images extracted from the stream. This
is much faster than before and frame rates can be as fast now
with network cameras as with capture cards and video. This
feature also has the side-effect that one ZoneMinder
installation can use another as a remote video source.
o NPH Streaming. After months of frustration I have finally
figured out why streams were corrupted using Cambozola
versions after 0.22. It turned out that apache was injecting
characters into the streams which was screwing up the headers.
I believe this to be because the initial header had no content-
length header, as the length is indeterminate. So I have added
a zero content length header which I believe fixes the problem
though perhaps not in the best way. I have also made the
installation link the existing zms binary to nph-zms so that
you can now use zms in non-parsed-header mode. If it detects
it is in this mode then the content-length header is not
output, though several other additional ones are. In nph mode
the false character injection seems to disappear so I suspect
this is a better way to use zms.
o Bulk Frame Records. With the recent advent of the
'Record' and 'Mocord' modes a lot of people have started using
ZoneMinder as a pseudo-DVR. This meant that a lot of database
activity was taking place as each captured frame required its
own entry in the database. The frames table has now been
reorganised so that 'bulk' frames may be written at defined
intervals to reduce this database activity. The records act as
markers and individual frame timings are interpolated in
between. Bulk frames are only used when no alarm or motion
detection activity is taking place and normal frame records
are kept otherwise.
o Event List Ordering and Scrolling. It was previously the
case that the 'Next' and 'Prev' buttons on the event view did
not always go to the event that was expected and sometimes
disappeared altogether. This behaviour has now been modified
and these buttons will now take you to the next and previous
events in the list which the event was selected from. Thus if
the list was sorted on ascending scores then the 'next' event
is the one below which has a higher score etc. A possibly
counterintuitive side effect of this is that as the default
list is sorted by descending time the 'next' event is the one
below in the list which will actually be earlier and the
'previous' event is later. So long as you remember that next
and prev refer to the order of the list you should be ok.
o Zone Percentage Sizes. Zone motion detection parameters
can be defined either in terms of total pixels or as a
percentage. This percentage was defined relative to the size
of the image as a whole. However this was difficult to
calculate or estimate especially with several zones of varying
sizes. In version 1.19.0 this has been changed so that the
percentage relates to the size of the zone itself instead.
This should make calculations somewhat easier. To convert your
existing zones you can run zmupdate.pl with the -z option,
though this should be done only once and you should backup
your database beforehand in case of error.
o Console View System Display. The console display was
slight revamped to indicate disk space usage (via the 'df'
command) on the events partition,
o Zone Form Validation. Changes applied in version 1.18.0
to prevent invalidate entries in the zone definition form
actually had the opposite effect due to JavaScript treating
everything as a string and not a number (e.g. 5 is greater
than 123). This is now corrected.
o Default Rate and Scales. You can now specify (in the
options dialog) the default scale you would like to view live
and event feeds at. You can also give a default rate for
viewing event replays.
o More Rates. Additional faster rates have been included,
up to 100 times.
o Frame Buffer Size. Previously it was possible for frames
being sent from the analysis daemon to the frame server to
exceed the defined maximum buffer size in which case the write
would fail. It is now possible to define a larger size if
necessary to prevent this. Note that you may have to adjust
your system configuration to accommodate this. For further
details check the help for the ZM_FRAME_SOCKET_SIZE option.
o Filter Name Duplication. Following recent changes to the
filters table, several people reported that when saving
filters they actually got a duplicate. This resulted in
several copies of filters all with the same name as the
constraint on unique filter names was not present. Well it is
now so when upgrading your database all the filters will be
renamed from 'myfilter' to 'myfilter_<id>' where '<id>' is the
id number in the database (which is then removed). In general
the higher the id number the more recent the filter. So you
should go through your filter list deleting old copies and
then rename the last one back to it's original name.
o Filter Form. Problem were reported with the filtering
form where several selections generated SQL errors. This is
now fixed.
o Filter Image Attachments. A fix was made to zmfilter.pl
to prevent it trying to attach<63> alarm images to non-alarm
events.
o Video Rate Specification. A fix was made to zmvideo.pl
that corrected a problem with no default frame being used if
none was passed in.
o RBG->BGR Black Screen. Fixed an issue with black screens
being reported in RGB24 mode if RGB->BGR invert was not
selected.
o Monitor Deletion. Fixed a problem with event files not
being deleted when monitor was.
o A translation for the Dutch (nl_nl) language has been
included.
12.14. Release 1.18.1
Minor bugfixes.
o Filter Monitor Name Bug. A bug was present in the
previous release where monitor names where not correctly
handled in filters. This is now fixed.
o Database Upgrade Change. Users upgrading from releases
prior to 1.18.0 please note that now as part of the upgrade
process all your filters will have any automatic actions
unset. This is because the previous affinity to a particular
monitor has now been removed and you may be left with several
filters all doing the same thing to all of the events or have
filters which for instance delete events on only one monitor
but which now would delete them for all of them. It is
recommended that you review your list of saved filters and
delete duplicates before adding any monitor specific terms and
resetting the actions for any that remain.
12.15. Release 1.18.0
Major optimisations, important new features and some bugfixes.
o Optimisations and Performance Improvements. This release
contains several major performance improvements in various
areas. The first of these is that image processing for YUV
style input formats are now pretty much handled at almost the
same speed as native RGB formats. As this is what the capture
daemons spend most of their time doing, the improvement helps
reduce the amount of CPU time by a significant degree.
Application of these changes also highlighted a bug that had
existed previously in YUV conversion which caused incorrect
conversions for certain values. The other two main areas of
optimisation are in the Blend and Delta image functions.
Normally when doing motion detection the analysis daemons
spend about 99% of their time comparing a captured image with
the reference image and then blending the two ready for the
next capture. Both of these functions have been significantly
improved. In previous versions there were two options for
calculating image deltas (or differences), a simple RGB
average and a Y channel calculation. Historically the RGB one
was faster however with the optimisations the Y channel
calculation (which is more accurate) is now 15-20% faster and
so has become the default though you can select either method
by the ZM_Y_IMAGE_DELTAS configuration option. A new method of
image blending has also been added which is up to 6 times
faster than the old one which is retained for compatibility
and because in some unusual circumstances it may still be more
accurate (see the ZM_FAST_IMAGE_BLENDS option for details).
Altogether these optimisations (along with other common sense
ones such as not maintaining a reference image in 'Record'
mode where it is not used) significantly reduce the CPU load
for most systems, especially when alarms are not in progress.
If an alarm is detected then a lot of file system and database
activity takes place which is limited by the speed of these
resources so the gain will not be as much.
o Remote Authentication. This document has previously
indicated that basic authentication for network cameras could
be used by entering a hostname of the form of
<user>:<pass>@<hostname>. This was not actually the case as
the relevant authentication header was never sent. This is now
fixed and addresses of this form can now be used.
o Filter Date Parsing. The zmfilter.pl date parsing now
correctly reports when dates or times which it cannot parse
are used.
o Monitor Independent Filters. Previously filters were
closely tied to a monitor and a new filter had to be created
for each monitor. This has now changed and filters can now
specify an associated monitor in the same was as other
parameters. Links have now been added to the main console view
to allow you to view lists of events from all monitors in one
and saved filters can now affected as many or as few monitors
as you wish. IMPORTANT: Please note that as part of the
upgrade process all your filters will have any automatic
actions unset. This is because the previous affinity to a
particular monitor has now been removed and you may be left
with several filters all doing the same thing to all of the
events or have filters which for instance delete events on
only one monitor but which now would delete them for all of
them. It is recommended that you review your list of saved
filters and delete duplicates before adding any monitor
specific terms and resetting the actions for any that remain.
o New Filter Operators. Two new filter operators and their
inverse have been added. You can now indicate whether a value
is in a set of other values, for example 'cat' is in the set
of 'cat, dog, cow, horse'. You can also use regular
expressions so 'cat' matches '^c.*'. The 'not in set' and 'not
matches' operators are also available.
o Additional Scales. Enhancements to the scaling algorithm
mean that non binary scales are now just as easy to apply,
thus new scales such as 0.75x have been added. Others can be
easily included if necessary.
o Montage Sizing. The montage view allows you to view all
of your active cameras in one window. However if your cameras
are different sizes then this becomes very untidy. You can now
constrain the image size of each monitor in this view to a
fixed size with the ZM_WEB_MONTAGE_WIDTH and
ZM_WEB_MONTAGE_HEIGHT configuration options. Monitor images
will be enlarged or reduced as necessary.
o Compact Montage. The traditional montage view includes
individual small menus for each monitor and a status display.
This results in a somewhat cluttered display and the
refreshing of the status displays may generate more accesses
than desirable. Using the ZM_WEB_COMPACT_MONTAGE configuration
option allows this montage view to only include the monitor
streams and one overall menu bar with no status displays.
o Monitor Name Constraint. The name given to a monitor is
used in file paths and several other areas. Thus it is
important that it follows certain conventions but up until
this release these names were unrestricted. The monitor form
now limits monitor names to alphanumeric characters plus
hyphen and underscore.
o Timestamp Change. Traditionally ZoneMinder has time-
stamped each image as it is captured. This ensures that all
images have their capture time recorded immediately. However
there are several side-effects which may be undesirable.
Firstly the time and resource is spent time-stamping images
that are not recorded and which are discarded, secondly the
timestamp is included in any motion detection and may
potentially trigger an alarm if detection parameters are very
sensitive. The third effect is that as the timestamp is added
to the image at it's native resolution, if the image is scaled
then the timestamp is scaled also. This may not be a problem
for enlargement but if the image size is reduced then it may
become illegible. This version now allows you, via the
ZM_TIMESTAMP_ON_CAPTURE configuration option, to indicate
whether the timestamps should be added on capture, as before,
or only added when the image is viewed or recorded. Setting it
to this later value allows timestamps to be added to scaled
images. This is little performance impact either way.
o Scaleable Stills View. The stills view of a monitor (when
streaming is not available or desired) is now scaleable in the
same way as the streamed view.
o Double Buffered Stills View. The stills view has now been
restructured to allow a double buffering approach. Thus a new
image is loaded in the background and only written to screen
when complete. This removes the refresh flicker that means
that the screen blanks periodically however uses more
JavaScript so may not be suitable for all platforms. Whether
ZoneMinder uses double buffering or not is controlled by the
ZM_WEB_DOUBLE_BUFFER configuration option.
o Fixed Length Event Bug. A bug was reported whereby the
fixed length events that could be specified for use in Record
or Mocord mode could sometimes result in events a multiple of
that length. So events that were meant to be 15 minutes long
could sometimes be 30 or even 45 minutes. This was especially
the case with monitors that had low frame rates. This is now
fixed.
12.16. Release 1.17.2
Minor features, bug fixes and additional languages.
o Pending Process Bug. A bug was found whereby a process
that was scheduled to be started in the future (due to
repeated failures) would drop out of the pending queue if a
further explicit restart was attempted. This is now fixed.
o Strsignal Function. The strsignal function was included
from version 1.17.1 however this is not ubiquitous on all
distributions. The existence of this function is now tested
for by the configure script and it is not used if not present.
o Add Max Alarm Threshold. Previously the alarm threshold
(which is the amount a pixel has to differ from it's
counterpart in the reference image) existed only in a
'minimum' form meaning pixels that were more different
matched. A maximum has now been added to assist in screening
out large changes in brightness. In addition to this a number
of new consistency checks have been added to the zone
definition form to try and prevent bogus or invalid settings.
o Diagnostic Zone Images. A regularly requested feature is
that of adding extra information to allow diagnostics of the
process of image detection. This has previously been somewhat
hit and miss but in this version a new configuration option
ZM_RECORD_DIAG_IMAGES has been included to allow this. This
option will generate several images for each captured frame in
an alarm including each reference image and a series of images
containing the image differences at various stages in the
process. It is not possible to record these for the image
prior to an alarm but those following it are included and
should assist in tuning the zones to provide optimal motion
detection.
o Event Images Renamed. The capture and analysis images
recorded during an event have been renamed from capture-
???.jpg to ???-capture, and from analyse-???.jpg to ???-
analyse.jpg. This is to allow all images (including diagnostic
ones) to be associated with the frame sequence number more
easily. This means that old events will no longer be able to
be viewed as the wrong image will be being searched for. To
avoid this you can use the new 'zmupdate.pl' utility to rename
all your old images by doing 'perl zmupdate.pl -r' as an
appropriately privileged or root user.
o Version checking. ZoneMinder will now optionally check
for new versions of itself at zoneminder.com. This is done
with a simple http get and no personal information otherwise
than your current version of ZoneMinder is transmitted or
recorded. If new versions are found you may be alerted of them
via the web interface. This is an initial step towards
enhancing and automating the upgrade process.
o Force Java. Previously ZoneMinder could be forced to
override it's detection of browser capabilities to prevent the
Cambozola Java applet being used. However sometimes the
opposite effect was desired and using the applet was preferred
to native image handling. This has now been made possible by
making the ZM_CAN_STREAM option tri-state allowing 'auto',
'yes' or 'no' to be used to provide all alternatives.
o Alarms Cleared on Exit. In previous versions if an alarm
was present when the analysis daemon (zma) exited the alarm
would remain flagged. This had little effect except if the
monitor was being watched however it was a bit annoying so any
alarm flag is now cleared when this daemon exits.
o New Languages. Translations for Japanese (ja_jp), French
(fr_fr) and Russian (ru_ru) are now included.
12.17. Release 1.17.1
Bugfixes and additional languages.
o Login Bug. A bug was identified whereby an unauthorised
user could gain access to the console view of ZoneMinder. This
was the only view available and no access to any camera views
or configuration was possible. This bug is now fixed.
o New Languages. Two new language files were added. These
allow ZoneMinder to use the German (de_de) and Polish (pl_pl)
languages.
o Language File Format. The format of the language file was
changed to allow the specification of character set and locale
as well as have more flexibility in the calculation of plural
forms.
o Option Language. The prompts and help text for the
options is now also available for translation. A guide is
included in the language file to allow this if necessary.
Currently language translations exclude the options settings
as this is a rarely accessed area and contains a great deal of
text. The new format allows individual options to be
translated piecemeal as the opportunity arises.
12.18. Release 1.17.0
Language changes and other enhancements.
o Version Numbering. ZoneMinder version numbers have now
changed. This is to allow more frequent 'point' releases which
are expected to happen for instance whenever new language
files are included. Previously all releases had the same
version increment so it was difficult to tell the significance
of any particular release. Now the version number is in the
x.y.z format where a change in x signifies a major fundamental
or architectural rework, a change in y will indicate a new
release containing incremental feature changes or fixes
recommend to all users and a change in z will generally mean
minor non-functional or critical modifications which would not
be recommended as important to all users. As ZoneMinder has
been referred to by the point release up until now, e.g. .15,
.16 etc the next number in that sequence has been retained for
continuity and to avoid having any ambiguity in version
numbers.
o Language Support. ZoneMinder now allows specification of
system and user specific languages other than UK English.
These languages are given in language files named
zm_lang_nn_mm.php which can be created from the default
zm_lang_en_gb.php file. If your language is not included then
please consider doing a translation by checking this file and
submitting your changes back for inclusion in future releases.
o Syntactic Improvements. Previously setting 'NOTICE'
errors on in PHP would flag tens or hundreds of violations in
the ZoneMinder web files. Whilst not strictly errors this
represented sloppy coding and sometimes covered up genuine
bugs. All the files have been revisited and revised to ensure
that a many of these problems as possible have been eliminated
and only the very few where the fix would be significantly
less optimal than the problem remain.
o Stream Scaling Resizing. Previously when watching a
stream and modifying the scale of the streamed feed only the
actual feed would change size and the containing frames and
windows would remain the same. This was fine for changes to
smaller scales but problematic for larger scales. This has
been changed for that the window and frames will now resize
appropriately.
o Mmap Return Value. A problem identified by users in the
forum relating to checking of return values from the mmap
function call has been corrected.
o Minor Bugs. A number of minor bugs and inconsistencies
were corrected.
12.19. Release 0.9.16
Major usability enhancement and fixes.
o Run States. Instead of the old 'start/stop' links the
current system state is now a link which takes you to a dialog
which allows you to start, restart or stop the system. You can
also save the current run state which basically takes a
snapshot of the current monitor functions and saves that. You
can then reselect that state later which basically involves
resetting the monitors to have these saved functions and then
doing a system restart.
o New Monitor Functions. Instead of Passive, Active, and
X10, the modes are now Monitor (= old Passive) which just
allows you to watch the feed, Modect (= old Active) which is
MOtion DetECT and which will capture events as previously,
Record which continuously records with no analysis and MoCord
which is a hybrid of Modect and Record and which will
continuously record but also do motion detection and highlight
where this has occurred. The Record and Mocord functions both
records events whose length in seconds is defined by the
'Section Length' monitor attribute. You can additionally
specify a 'Frame Skip' value to tell it to not record 'n'
frames at a time, when not alarmed.
o X10 Function removed. The X10 mode has been removed and
replaced by an indication of whether the monitor is
'continuous' or 'triggered'. This basically just indicates
whether it may be controlled outside of zmdc and zmpkg.
Additionally the X10 triggers may now be specified in an X10
section. This has changed to allow for other types of triggers
to be added more easily.
o Paginated Event listings. The event listings are
paginated by default. You can list all of the events if you
like by choosing the appropriate option. There are shortcuts
to pages of events at the top of the listing. If these produce
strange looking sequences like 1,2, 3, 5, 9, 17, 37 etc this
is deliberate and uses an exponential algorithm intended to
allow you to quickly navigate through the list to a particular
page in the minimum number of clicks.
o Scaleable Streams. Event and monitor streams can now be
scaled to a certain extent allowing you to view at a different
resolution than that captured. This area may be somewhat
incomplete especially in terms of monitoring at a higher
screen size where the frame is not adjusted properly.
o Variable Frame Rates. Event streams can now be viewed at
various rates allowing faster review (if your bandwidth
allows) to long events, or slower for more precision.
o Scaleable/Variable MPEG generation. Generation of MPEG
videos now also allows you to specify the scale relative to
the original image and also the frame rate. Again, for long
events captured in the perpetual recording modes this will
allow a faster review of the period the event covers.
o Tabbed Monitor options. Specification and modification of
monitors is now in a tabbed form for easier navigation.
o Additional stream headers. The stream headers have been
changed to hopefully ensure that they are less likely to be
cached.
o Maximum process restart delay. zmdc.pl now has an upper
limit (15 minutes) to the time it waits before restarting
continuously crashing processes.
o Intelligent Module inclusion. zmfilter.pl now includes
Archive::Zip and other modules on an as needed basis so won't
complain about them being missing unless they have been
explicitly configured to be used.
o Adaptive Watchdog. zmwatch now more adaptive to actual
frame rates.
o Fixed zmfilter CPU sucking bug. zmfilter.pl will now
restart on failure to read shared memory. Previously this
could go into a nasty CPU sucking loop!
o New zmconfig options. zmconfig.pl has a new option to run
with no database if necessary
o File reorganisation. Various administrative file changes
and reorganisations.
o Compiler warnings. Various tweaks and modifications to
reduce compiler and memory warnings.
o SQL Buffer size. Increased SQL buffer size to cope with
large pre-event buffers, plus a couple of other buffers have
been enlarged.
o Incorrect Frame time offsets. The time offsets in alarmed
frames were incorrect and based on the time of storage rather
than capture. This gave the impression that there was a delay
after the first alarmed frame and messed up some streaming
timings. This has been fixed.
o Event Frame listing. You can now view details of the
frames captured such as their time and score etc by clicking
on the scores in the events views.
o Refined shared memory handling. Fixed zmfilter, zmwatch
and zmx10 to allow zero as a valid shared memory id to allow
them to keep on working if the segment has been marked for
deletion
o Frame daemon stability. Changed image buffer in zmf to be
static rather than dynamic. This has made zmf much more
stable.
o MPEG overwrite option. Fixed the 'Overwrite' checkbox in
video generation to actually overwrite the video. Modded the
page slightly also.
o Daemon control improved. Changing between monitor
functions, e.g. Modect, Mocord etc now restarts the correct
daemons.
o Improved time based filters. Filters that include time
based clauses now get executed regardless of whether new
events are being generated.
o Audit daemon started unconditionally. zmaudit is now
started regardless of the setting of FAST_DELETES as zmfilter
depends on it being there.
o Filtering more active. zmfilter is now started in
'Monitor' mode. It does not run in when monitors are
completely off however.
o Stills paged. The stills view of events is now paginated
for easier navigation.
o Archive images optional. Normally when an alarm is
detected a set of raw images is saved along with a mirror set
of images containing motion highlighting. This second set can
now optionally be disabled.
o Settings in auth mode. Control of camera brightness,
contrast etc did not previously work when running in
authorised mode. This is now fixed.
o zms parameter bug fixed. The streaming server incorrectly
parsed and assigned one of it's arguments. This is now fixed.
o zmu brighness bug. Previously camera brightness was not
correctly parsed from command line options passed to zmu.
o Event window width variable. Event windows now scale to
fit the event image size.
12.20. Release 0.9.15
Various bug fixes from the last release and before.
o Bandwidth. A bug was introduced in .14 which caused a
corrupted console display and manic refreshes on new
installations. This was due to a missing bandwidth setting
when no existing cookie was detected. This is now fixed.
o Again in .14 a problem occurred for a new release whereby
zmconfig wanted to know the database details and but also
previously wanted to access the database before it had asked
the questions. This has now been addressed though it does
require that zmconfig is run twice initially, once to created
the scripts and once to import the configuration into the
database.
o In association with the previous error, the
zm_config_defines.h file was not created in the absence of the
database as this was what was used to assign configuration
ids. This now takes place regardless of the database.
o The SQL to create the Users table was mistakenly omitted
from the .12 database upgrade script this has now been
corrected.
o A bug in zmfilter was pointed out whereby the dynamic
loading of the Zip or Tar archive modules depending on a
preference actually wasn't. It was looking for both and
loading both at compile time. This has now been modified to be
fully runtime.
o The database user definitions in the zmvideo script
indicated one database user while the database connection used
a different one. This prevented any videos being generated.
o A problem was found if using the zmf frame server and
greyscale images. The option to colourise JPEG images is
intended to be used to ensure that all JPEG files are written
with a 24 bit colourspace as certain tools such as ffmpeg
require this. However in the circumstances described above
images written by zma directly were colourised whereas those
written by zmf weren't. A change has been made whereby if set
all greyscale JPEG images are colourised in all circumstances.
12.21. Release 0.9.14
Major new feature and important bug-fixes.
o Web configuration. Following many requests and to make
ZoneMinder easier to administer the configuration system has
been changed slightly. You should now still run zmconfig.pl to
specify an initial configuration but you now only need to
answer the first few questions to give a core set of options
including the database options. The remainder of configuration
options can then be ignored to start with and all but the core
options will be written to the database. You can then view and
modify these options from the web interface and apply then
without recompilation, which is now only necessary if you
change the core configuration.
o Following a number of requests the .sock file directory
is now configurable in zmconfig.
o Y channel bug. When using colour cameras a motion
detection problem was present if fast RGB images deltas
(ZM_FAST_RGB_DIFFS) was off. This was an overflow error in the
calculation of the Y channel and caused excessive image
differences to be calculated. This has now been fixed.
o The use of the Term::Readkey perl module in zmaudit.pl
has been removed. This module had been removed from
zmconfig.pl previously but had lingered in this script.
o A bug was found in zmx10.pl causing a crash if time
delayed X10 events were used. This has now been fixed.
o Removed use of 'zmu' binary from zmwatch.pl and zmx10.pl.
Previously these scripts had used zmu to determine last image
time and alarm state information. The use of this script was a
bit overkill and the introduction of user permissions
complicated matter slightly so these scripts now access the
shared memory directly.
o Shared memory permissions. Following introduction of a
user permissions system the previous 777 mode for shared
memory was deemed insecure. Consequently from now on shared
memory is only accessible from the owner. This means that zmu
will only work when run as root or the web user unless you set
it setuid where it should still be secure as it will require
authentication.
o All SQL buffers in the C++ code have been enlarged. There
was previously an issue with a buffer overflow on certain
occasions.
12.22. Release 0.9.13
Beta version of several features and fixes, never generally
released.
o Following a number of requests the .sock file directory
is now configurable in zmconfig.
o Changed some of the core video calls to be V4L2
compatible. This primarily involved opening the video devices
and memory maps as read/write and not just read-only.
o Shared memory has now been rationalised to prevent some
common problems. Remember to shutdown the whole ZM package
before installing, from this version on it will remove all old
shared memory segments.
o Fixed not numeric comparison in zmwatch which was
causing, or appeared to be causing, some errors.
o Fixed zone image map bug for percentage zones. When you
had defined a zone in percentage terms, the image map used to
select it for editing was broken. This is now fixed.
o New contrast/brightness etc adjustments feature. This
accessible from the Settings link on the monitor window. It's
fairly basic at present but should work for most types of
cameras. If you have any device or driver specific auto-
brightness, auto-contrast etc enabled the changes you make may
appear to work but may be overridden by the auto feature
immediately so check for that if your changes do not appear to
be having an effect. Also if you have a number of cameras
being multiplexed onto one device then any changes here will
probably affect all your cameras.
o Some redundant window scrollbars removed.
o Added user and access control. If enabled in config
(ZM_OPT_USE_AUTH) then you will need to define and login as ZM
users. There will be one users already defined, with username
'admin' and password 'admin'. This user is defined will full
permissions and clicking on the 'Options' link from the main
console window will allow you to modify and create users with
various permission sets which hopefully will satisfy most
requirements. These users (except any defined with 'system'
edit capability) can be restricted to certain cameras by
adding the monitor ids as a comma-separated list (no spaces)
to the appropriate field. Users limited to specific monitors
may not create or delete monitors even if defined with monitor
edit permissions.
o Some windows now (optionally) use a JavaScript timeout to
refresh themselves rather than a refresh header. Since refresh
headers were interrupted if a link of the page was linked
there were previously various forced refreshes from child
windows to restart the refresh process. By using JS refresh
timers which are not interrupted these extraneous refreshes
have been mostly eliminated.
12.23. Release 0.9.12
Mostly bug-fixes with a couple of minor features.
o Double first images. Fixed a problem where the first
image of an event was being recorded twice. I don't think this
was at the cost of any of the other images but one copy was an
extra.
o Made zmdc connect more intelligent. On the suggestion of
a couple of people I have made the zmdc.pl server spawning and
waiting a bit more intelligent. Rather than waiting a fixed
(short) amount of time, it now polls every second for a while,
stopping if the connection is made. Thanks to Todd McAnally
for the initial suggestion.
o Added image view to events lists. Again a partial
implementation of a suggested feature. If you click on the
score column you will now get a snapshot of the event frame
with the highest score. This is to enable you to quickly see
what the event was about without having to watch the stream or
view all the static images.
o Make delta times variable precision. A couple of problems
had been reported where long events got negative durations.
This was due to an overflow in a time difference routine. This
had been operating on fixed precision allowing high precision
for short deltas. This routine has been changed to allow
variable precision and events will now have to be several days
long to wrap in this way.
o Fixed round detection problem. Although the existence or
otherwise of the 'round' function is correctly detected, the
appropriate header file with the results of this test was not
included which was not helpful. This has been corrected.
o Fixed monitor rename bug. Renaming a monitor did not
correctly modify the events directory to reflect this. This
has now been fixed.
o OPT_MPEG bug. A bug was reported (by Fernando Diaz) where
the results of the ZM_OPT_MPEG configuration variable was not
correctly imported into the scripts. This now happens as
intended.
o Fixed zmvideo.pl event length bug. The zmvideo.pl script
which is used to generate video MPEG files tries to calculate
the correct frame rate based on the length of the event and
the number of frames it contains. Previously it did not take
account of the pre and post event frames and so passed a much
shorter value to the mpeg encoder than it should. This will
only have affected short events encoded with ffmpeg but will
have resulted in much faster frame rates than necessary. This
has now been corrected to take the whole event length into
account.
o Fixed remote camera memory leak. A memory leak was
reported when capturing with remote cameras, this is now
fixed.
o Orientation. Added option to rotate or invert captured
images for cameras mounted at unusual angles.
o Fixed filter bug. A bug in the zmfilter.pl script was
detected and reported by Ernst Lehmann. This bug basically
meant that events were not checked as often as they should
have been and many may have been left out for filters that had
no time component. The script has now been updated to reflect
Ernst's suggested changes.
o Stylesheet change. Previously the stylesheet didn't
really work very well on Mozilla, Netscape and browsers other
than IE. This turned out to be because I was using HTML style
comments in there instead of C style ones. This has now been
corrected so you should see the correct styles.
o Zmconfig.pl ReadKey. Thanks to a ridiculously sensible
suggestion from Carlton Thomas this module has been removed
from zmconfig.pl. Originally Term::ReadKey was in there for
funky single character unbuffered input but that has long
since disappeared so just regular perl input methods are used
now. This removes one of the most irritating features about
ZoneMinder installs.
o Delete monitor confirm. Due to some unfortunate accidents
by users, attempts to delete monitors will now require
confirmation.
o Detect linmysqlclient.a. Added better detection script
into 'configure' top spot when libmysqlclient.a is missing.
12.24. Release 0.9.11
Various new features and fixes.
o 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.
o Tabulated events - The main events view is now tabulated
to look a bit nicer.
o 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.
o 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.
o Fixed Mozilla JavaScript - Various JavaScript
functionality did not function on Mozilla, Netscape and other
browsers. This is now (hopefully) fixed.
o 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!
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Fixed STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG - Previously this actually
behaved the opposite of what it was supposed to, ie. if you
wanted it strict it wasn't and vice versa. Thanks to Dan
Merillat for pointing this one out.
o 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!
12.25. Release 0.9.10
Many bug-fixes and major feature enhancements.
o 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.
o Low event id bug - Fixed bug where events with an id of <
1000 were being cleaned up by zmaudit.pl by mistake.
o Source file 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.
o Streamed cycle view - The monitor cycle view (the one
where each monitor is displayed sequentially) now supports
streams as well as stills.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Alarm reference update - Added option to not blend
alarmed images into the reference image. See the help in
zmconfig.pl for caveats.
o Disappearing monitors - Fixed the disappearing monitor
problem in the console view where monitors with no events were
randomly not being shown.
o Clean and tidy - Cleaned up a load of compiler warnings
and miscellanea to ensure a cleaner happier build.
o 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).
o Expire streams - Added expiry headers to streamed images
so they will always display fully.
o 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.
o USR blocking - The debug USR signals were not being
blocked properly leading to nasty effects in zmc mostly.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
12.26. Release 0.9.9
Mainly bug-fixes and minor feature enhancements.
o 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.
o Added creation of events directory - Previously the
'events' directory was not created on install, this has been
fixed.
o 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.
o 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.
o Corrected extraneous Width to be Height - The last
version of zmu included a Width comment which should have been
height.
o 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.
o 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.
o Zone deletion problem - A problem was found such that
when deleting zones the appropriate daemons were not being
asked to restart daemons correctly.
o Console changes - The current version number is now
displayed in the console. A refresh button has also been added
along with a minor reorg.
o 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.
o 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.
12.27. Release 0.9.8
Several new features and bug-fixes
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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
o (especially with the -v option). These options can then
be used as a starting point for your ZoneMinder configuration.
o Added FPS in status field - The status field in the web
monitor views now contains an FPS setting as well as the
status.
o Zmconfig changes - zmconfig handles missing options
better and rewrites config file even in non-interactive mode.
o Fixed config problems in zmcfg.h - Some config was not
being set up correctly in zmcfg.h.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Revamped the console window slightly - The console window
has now been reformatted slightly to give more and better
information including server load.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Fixed cambolzola opt bug - There was a bug in the
Cambozola options, I can't remember what it was but it's
fixed!
o 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.
o 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.
o Looser video configuration - Some video configuration
errors can now be ignored via the STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG option.
o 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.
12.28. 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.
o Added zmconfig.pl script to help with configuration.
o Revamped to work better with configure scripts
o Monitors now have more configuration options, including
some that were statically defined before such as location and
format of the image timestamps.
o Removed Alarms table from schema as not required, never
was actually...
o Added a number of new scripts, see the scripts directory
o 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.
o Added event filter to enable bulk viewing, upload or
deletion of events according to various attributes. Filter can
be saved and edited.
o Added last event id to shared memory for auto-filtering
etc.
o Changed zmu -i option to write to monitor named image
file.
o Made shared memory management somewhat more sensible.
o Now stores DB times as localtime rather than UTC avoiding
daylight saving related bugs.
o Fixed bug with inactive zones and added more debug.
o Changed main functions to return int.
o Added help and usage to zmu.
o Fixed browser acceptance problem, more easily defaults to
HTML.
o Split out the PHP files into a bunch with specific
functions rather than one monolithic one.
o Fixed NetPBM paths and changed _SERVER to
HTTP_SERVER_VARS.
o Added HUP signal on zone deletion.
o Added NETPBM_DIR and conditional netpbm stuff.
o Removed hard coded window sizes, all popup window
dimensions can be specified in zmconfig.php
o Changed form methods to 'get' from 'post' to avoid
resubmit warnings all the time.
o Added conditional sound to alarm on web interface.
o Fixed syntax error when adding default monitor.
o Some of the web views have changed slightly to
accommodate the separate events view.
o And much much more, probably...
12.29. Release 0.0.1
Initial release, therefore nothing new.
13. 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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. Work has already begun on this feature.
o Mouseover help - A bit more help popping up when you
mouseover things would be handy. A bit more help full stop
actually.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Add sound support to allow a captured audio channel to be
associated with a video device. Work on this feature has
already begun.
14. Bugs
o 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).
o 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.
15. Non-Bugs
o Yes, those are tabs in the indents; I like tabs so don't
go changing them to spaces please. Also, yes I 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.
16. License
ZoneMinder is released under the GPL, see below.
ZoneMinder README, $Date$, $Revision:
1.9 $
Copyright (C) 2004 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.
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