zoneminder/README

ZONE MINDER v0.9.8
==================

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

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

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

As well as being fast ZM is designed to be friendly and even more than that, 
actually useful. As well as the fast video interface core it also comes with a 
user friendly and comprehensive PHP based web interface allowing you to control 
and monitor your cameras from home or even elsewhere. It supports variable web 
capabilities based on available bandwidth. The web interface also allows you to 
view events that your cameras have captured and archive them or review them time 
and again, or delete the ones you now longer wish to keep. The web pages 
directly interact with the core daemons ensuring full co-operation at all times.

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

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


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

ZM needs a couple of things to work. Firstly, it uses MySQL so you'll need that. 
In order to compile you need to make sure you have a development installation 
and not just a runtime. Next it does things with JPEGs so you'll need at least 
libjpeg.a which I think come as standard nowadays. It also uses the netpbm 
utilities in a very limited way to generate thumbnails under certain 
circumstances though this can be modified. ZM can generate MPEG videos if 
necessary, for this you'll need the Berkeley MPEG encoder, if you don't have it 
don't worry the options will be hidden and you'll not miss much really. The web 
interface uses PHP and so you need that in your apache or whatever as well. 
Finally, there is quite a bit of image streaming in the package so if you don't 
have Netscape I recommend you get the excellent Cambozola java applet from 
http://www.charliemouse.com/code/cambozola/ which will let you view the image 
stream in IE and others. Otherwise you're limited to just refreshing still 
images.

Hardware wise, ZM has been used with BTTV cards and USB cameras with the V4L 
interface. I don't have a lot of cameras so I've not had change to test it much. 
Please let me know if your camera works or not. You do need to have Video 4 
Linux installed. I've not got many machines so I've only really used it on 
Redhat 7.2, which does have everything there by default I think. Please give me 
feedback on other distributions.


Building
========

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

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

where <20>with-mysql identifies where you have installed MySQL (usually /usr), --
with-webdir is the directory to which you want to install the PHP files, and --
with-cgidir is the directory to which you want to install CGI files. These 
directories could be /var/www/html/zm and /var/www/cgi-bin for example. There 
are also two further arguments you can add if your web user and group are not 
both <20>apache<68>. These are --with-webuser and --with-webgroup. Type
./configure --help for details.

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

./zmconfig.pl

to get it started. It is an interactive utility and will prompt you by asked you 
various questions. For most questions typing <20>?<3F> will give you additional help 
if you need it. Once you<6F>ve answered all the questions it will write out a 
configuration file <20>zmconfig.txt<78> and then process various files to substitute 
the information in them. If you run it again it will remember your answers from 
before by reading <20>zmconfig.txt<78> before it starts. You can also edit this file 
directly to change values and if you do you can run zmconfig in non-interactive 
mode by typing

./zmconfig.pl <20>noi

which will just read your file and do the substations with no questions asked.

Among the first questions zmconfig.pl asks you are to do with the database and 
the next thing you should do is create it and the associated database users. You 
may notice that there are two sets of users and passwords. This is because the 
Streaming server and Utility binaries require only read access to the database 
so you may wish to create both a full access user and a limited access user. You 
can of course set both to the full access user. The included schema 
(zmschema.sql) can be used to actually create the tables required. The database 
is usually called 'zm'. If you are upgrading from a previous version you can use 
zmalter-x.y.z.sql to upgrade your database and make the necessary changes where 
x.y.z identifies the version of ZoneMinder you had installed previously. For a 
new installation the simplest way to create your database and users is as 
follows,

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

Though you may need to supply a username and password to the mysql commands to 
give yourself sufficient privileges to perform the required commands.

Then just type 'make' and off you go.


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

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

zmc - This is the ZoneMinder Capture daemon. This binary's job is to sit on a 
video device and such frames off it as fast as possible, this should run                                       
at more 
or less constant speed.
zma - This is the ZoneMinder Analysis daemon. This is the component that goes 
through the captured frames and checks them for alarming events. It generally 
keeps up with the zmc but if very busy may skip some frames to prevent it 
falling behind.
zms - This is the ZoneMinder Streaming server. The web interface connects with 
this to get real-time or historical streamed images.
zmu - This is the ZoneMinder Utility. It's basically a handy command line 
interface to several useful functions. Not really meant to be used by anyone 
except the web page (there's only limited 'help' in it so far) but can be if 
necessary.
zmfix <20> This is a small binary that exists only to ensure that the video device 
files can be read by the main capture daemons. It is often the case that these 
device files are set to be accessible by root only on boot. This binary runs 
setuid and ensures that they have appropriate permissions. This is not a daemon 
and runs only on system start and then exits.

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

zmpkg.pl - This is the ZoneMinder Package Control script. This is used by the
web interface ans 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 control the execution of saved filters and will be 
started and stopped by the web interface based on whether there are filters that 
have been defined to be autonomous. This script is also responsible for the 
automatic uploading of events to a 3rd party server.
zmaudit.pl - This script is used to check the consistency of the event file 
system and database. It can delete orphaned events, i.e. ones that appear in one 
location and not the other as well as checking that all the various event 
related tables are in line. It can be run interactively or in batch mode either 
from the command line or a cron job or similar. In the zmconfig.pl there is an 
option to specify fast event deletes where the web interface only deletes the 
event entry from the database itself. If this is set then it is this script that 
tidies up the rest.
zmx10.pl - This is an option script that can be used to initiate and monitor X10 
Home Automation style events and interface with an alarm system either by the 
generation of X10 signals on ZM events or by initiating ZM monitoring and 
capture on receipt of X10 signals from elsewhere, for instance the triggering of 
an X10 PIR.
zmwatch.pl - This is a simple script purely designed to keep an eye on the 
capture daemons and restart them if they lockup. It has been known for sync 
problems in the video drivers to cause this so this script makes sure that 
nothing important gets missed.
zm - This is the (optional) ZoneMinder init script, see below for details.

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

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

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

/sbin/chkconfig --add zm

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

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


Tutorial
========

To start with you should see the ZM Console window, this will resize itself to 
avoid being too intrusive on your desktop. Along the top there is a set of links 
to configure your bandwidth, this allows you to optimise your settings depending 
on where you are and the actual options relating to this are defined at the top 
of the zmconfig.php file. If you are using a browser on the same machine or 
network then choose high, over a cable or DSL link maybe choose medium and over 
a dialup choose low. You can experiment to see which is best. This setting is 
retained on a per machine basis with a persistent cookie.

Defining Monitors
-----------------
To use ZM properly you need to define at least one Monitor. Essentially a 
monitor is attached to a camera and will continually check it for motion 
detection and such like. So, next click 'Add New Monitor' to bring up the 
dialog. 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' to get a picture you're happy with, and to check your camera works
and then run 'zmu -d <device_no> -v' to get a dump of the settings. You can
then enter these values into the video related options of the monitor
configuration panel. If 'zmu' gives you an error related to permissions
run 'zmfix -a' to make sure you can access all the video devices.

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

Name - First choose a name for it, anything you like. 
Function - This essentially defines what the monitor is doing. This can be 
'None' meaning the monitor is currently disabled, 'Passive' meaning you can 
watch the streams coming from the camera but no alarms or events will be 
generated, or 'Active' meaning all the images will be analysed as well as the 
stream being available to watch. If you have specified X10 support then X10 is 
also available as an option which means that the monitor is generally passive 
but may go active on receipt of X10 commands. Generally you'll want 'Active' but 
for now leave this at 'None'. 
Device Number/Channel - Enter the device number that your camera is attached to, 
if its /dev/video0 enter '0' etc. Some video devices, e.g. BTTV cards support 
multiple cameras so in the Channel box choose the appropriate channel, or leave 
it at zero if you're using a USB camera or one without channels. 
Device Format - Now enter the video format of the video stream. This is defined 
in various system files but the two most common are 0 for PAL and 1 for NTSC.
Device Width/Height - The dimensions of the video stream your camera will 
supply. If your camera supports several just enter the one you'll want to use 
for this application, you can always change it later. However I would recommend 
starting with no larger than 352x288 and then perhaps increasing and seeing how 
performance is affected. This size should be adequate in most cases.
Device Colour Depth - Finally for the video part of the configuration enter the 
colour depth. ZM supports both greyscale and 24 bit colour, so enter 1 or 3 
here. Currently it doesn't support any of the more esoteric formats, like 15 bit 
etc. 
Timestamp Label Format - This relates to the timestamp that is applied to each 
frame. It is a sprintf style string. It is actually passed through sprintf and 
then through print to add the monitor name so a format of <20>%%s - %y/%m/%d 
%H:%M:%S<> would be recommended though you can modify it if necessary.
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 the height you supplied earlier minus 8 will place it on the bottom of 
the image.
Image Buffer Size <20> This option determines how many frames are held in the ring 
buffer at any one time. It can be any value you like with a couple of provisos, 
(see next options). However it is stored in shared memory and making it too 
large especially for large images with a high colour depth can use a lot of 
memory. A value of no more than 100 is usually ok.
Warmup Frames <20> 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. 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 <20> 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.
FPS Report Interval <20> 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.
Reference Image Blend %ge <20> Each analysed image in ZoneMinder is a composite of 
previous images and is formed by applying the current image as a certain 
percentage of the previous reference image. Thus, if we entered the recommended 
value of 10 here, each images part in the reference image will diminish by a 
factor of 0.9 each time round. So a typical reference image will be 10% the 
previous image, 9% the one before that and then 8.1%, 7.2%, 6.5% and so on of 
the rest of the way. An image will effectively vanish around 25 images later 
than when it was added. This blend value is what is specified here and if higher 
will make slower progressing events less detectable as the reference image would 
change more quickly. Similarly events will be deemed to be over much sooner as 
the reference image adapts to the new images more quickly. In signal processing 
terms the higher this value the steeper the event attack and decay of the 
signal. It depends on your particular requirements what the appropriate value 
would be for you but start with 10 here and adjust it later if necessary.
X10 Activation String <20> This option is only available if you have specified X10 
support in the configuration. If you have then this contents of this field 
determine when a monitor starts and stops being Active if its function is set to 
X10. Basically what this means is that a monitor with a Function of X10 normally 
acts as it is Passive, i.e. you can watch the video stream but no analysis is 
done. On receipt of the appropriate X10 signal however it effectively changes to 
Active mode and starts to analyse images until an X10 signal changes it back to 
Passive again. The format of this string is as follows,
	n : If you simply enter a number then the monitor will be activated when 
an X10 ON signal for that unit code is detected and will be deactivated when an 
OFF signal is detected.
	!n : This inverts the previous mode, e.g. !5 means that the monitor is 
activated when an OFF signal for unit code 5 is detected and deactivated by an 
ON.
	n+ : Entering a unit code followed by + means that the monitor is 
activated on receipt of a ON signal for that unit code but will ignore the OFF 
signal and as such will not be deactivated by this instruction. If you prepend a 
<EFBFBD>!<21> 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 
<EFBFBD>!<21> 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 <20> This has the same format as the previous field but 
instead of activating the monitor with will cause a forced alarm to be generated 
and an event recorded if the monitor is Active. The same definition as above 
apply except that for activated read alarmed and for deactivated read 
unalarmed(!). Again leave this blank for now.
X10 Output Alarm String <20> 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 'update' to add your monitor.

On the main console listing you will now see your monitor and some of its vital 
statistics. Each column is also a link and you get to other functions of ZM by 
choosing the appropriate one. For the most part I'll describe them left to right 
but let<65>s start with the Device column which you'll see showing red. This means 
that that device has no zmc (capture) daemon running on it, if it were orange it 
would mean that a zmc daemon was running but no zma (analysis) daemon and green 
means both are running. In our case it is red because we defined the Monitor to 
have a Function of None so no daemons are required. To get the daemons up and 
running you can either click on the device listed in the Device column, and 
start the daemons manually, or click on the Function listed and change it to 
'Active', which will ensure that the appropriate daemons are started 
automatically. Having a device status of red or orange does not necessarily 
constitute an error if you have deliberately disabled a monitor or have just put 
it into Passive mode. If you have several cameras (and thus monitors) on a 
device the device status colour reflects all of them, so if just one monitor is 
active then both daemons will be running even if all the other monitors are 
switched off. Once you have changed the function of your monitor, the main 
console window will be updated to reflect this change. If your device status 
does not go green then check your system and web server logs to see if it's 
something obvious like a bad path etc.

You can now add further monitors if you have cameras set up to support them. 
Once you have one or more monitors you may notice a 'Scan' link appears which 
allows you to cycle through a shot from each of your monitors (unless they are 
switched off) and get a still image from each in turn. Clicking on the image 
will take you to the monitor watch window, which will be discussed shortly. 
Returning to the main console window, if you click the Id of your monitor in the 
listing then you will have the opportunity to edit any of the settings your 
originally defined your monitor to have.

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

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

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

The final zone Type is Exclusive, this means that alarms will only be triggered 
in this zone if no alarms have already been triggered in Active zones. This is 
the most specialised of the zone types and you may never use it but in its place 
it is very useful. For instance in the camera covering my garden I keep watch 
for a hedgehog that visits most nights and scoffs the food out of my cats bowls. 
By creating a sensitive Exclusive zone in that area I can ensure that a hedgehog 
alarm will only trigger if there is activity in that small area. If something 
much bigger occurs, like someone walking by it will trigger a regular alarm and 
not one from the Exclusive zone. Thus I can ensure I get alarms for big events 
and also special small events but not the noise in between. I mentioned above 
that Inactive zones may be overlain on other zones to blank out areas however as 
a general principle you should try and make zones abut each other as much as 
possible and not overlaps to avoid repeated duplicate processing of the same 
area. For instance an Inclusive zone overlaying an Active zone when all other 
settings are the same will always trigger when the Active zone does which 
somewhat defeats the object of the exercise.

The rest of the zone settings are slightly simpler to explain. The first is 
Units which details whether certain of the following settings are in Pixels or 
Percent of the frame. In general pixels is more precise whereas percentages are 
easier to use to start with. If you change this setting all appropriate values 
below are redisplayed in the correct context. A good tip would be to initially 
enter the settings in Percent and then change to Pixels and refine any gaps. 
Repeated flipping between the settings will cause rounding errors, as ZM in 
general is not at home to Mr Floating Point for reasons of performance. 
Following the units the next four settings define the bounds of the Zone in the 
monitor frame and are self-explanatory with the exception of the fact that the 
minima are at the top left of the frame and the maxima are at the bottom right 
rather than Cartesian. The option after that allows you to specify what colour 
you'd like any alarms this zone generates to be highlighted on images, pick 
anything you like that will show up against your normal image background. This 
and all following options are irrelevant for Inactive zones and you will be 
prevented from setting them.

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

So to go back to the settings, the next one is an alarm threshold; this 
represents the difference in value between a pixel and its predecessor. For 
greyscale images this is simple but for colour images the colours are averaged 
first, originally this used an RMS (root mean squared) algorithm but calculating 
square roots mugs performance and does not seem to improve detection. Using an 
average does means that subtle colour changes without any brightness change may 
go undetected but this is not the normal circumstance. The following two 
settings define the minimum and maximum number of pixels that exceed this 
threshold that would cause an alarm. If the units are Percent this (and 
following options) refers to the percentage of the frame and not the zone, this 
is so these values can be related between zones. The minimum value must is 
matched or exceed for an alarm to be generated whereas the maximum must not be 
exceeded or the alarm will be cancelled. This is to allow for sudden changes 
such as lights coming on etc, which you may wish to disregard. In general a 
value of zero for any of these settings causes that value to be ignored, so you 
can safely set a maximum to zero and it will not be used. The use of just a 
number of pixels is however a very brute force method of detection as many small 
events dispersed widely are not distinguished from a compact one.

To combat this ZM applies several other functions to the data to improve its 
ability to distinguish interesting signals from uninteresting noise. The first 
of these is a filter that removes any pixels that do not participate in a 
contiguous block of pixels above a certain size. The options that control this 
are the Filter Width and Height settings, which are always pixels and which 
should be fairly small, and an odd number. Application of this filter removes 
any tiny or discontinuous pixels that don't form part of a discrete block. 
Following that are two further bounds that specify the limits of pixels that 
would cause an alarm after this filtering process. As the filtering process only 
removes pixels it makes no sense for the Minimum and Maximum Filtered Area to be 
larger than the equivalent Alarmed Area and in general they should be smaller or 
the same. The next step in the analysis phase is the collation of any remaining 
alarmed areas into contiguous blobs. This process parses the image and forms any 
pixels that adjoin other alarmed pixels into one or more larger blobs. These 
blobs may be any shape and can be as large as the zone itself or as small as the 
filtered size. The Minimum and Maximum Blob Size settings allow you to define 
limits within which an alarm will be generated. Of these only the Minimum is 
likely to be very useful. Finally the Minimum and Maximum Blobs specify the 
limits of the actual number of blobs detected. If an image change satisfies all 
these requirements it becomes an alarm event.

Viewing Monitors
----------------
As this point you should have one or more Monitors running with one or more 
Zones each. Returning to the main Console window you will see your monitors 
listed once more. The columns not explored so far are the Monitor name, and 
various event totals for certain periods of time. Clicking on any of the event 
totals will bring up a variation on the same window but click on the Monitor 
name for now. On doing so up will pop another window which should be scaled to 
contain a heading, an image from your monitor, a status and a list of events if 
any have been generated. Depending on whether you are able to view a streamed 
image or not the image frame will either be this stream or a series of stills. 
You have the option to change from one to the other (if available) at the centre 
of the top heading. The image should be self-explanatory but if it looks like 
garbage it is possible that the video configuration is wrong so look in your 
system error log and check for or report anything unusual. The centre of the 
window will have a tiny frame that just contains a status; this will be 'Idle', 
'Alarm' or 'Alert' depending on the function of the Monitor and what's going on 
in the field of view. Idle means nothing is happening, Alarm means there is an 
alarm in progress and Alert means that an alarm has happened and the monitor is 
cooling down, if another alarm is generated in this time it will just become 
part of the same event. These indicators are colour coded in green, red and 
amber. By default if you have minimised this window or opened other windows in 
front it will pop up to the front if it goes to Alarm state. This behaviour can 
be turned off in configuration at the top of the zmconfig.php file. You can also 
specify a sound file in the configuration, which will be played when an alarm 
occurs to alert you to the fact if you are not in front of your computer. This 
should be a short sound of only a couple of seconds ideally. Note that as the 
status is refreshed every few seconds it is possible for this not to alert you 
to every event that takes place, so you shouldn't rely on it for this purpose if 
you expect very brief events. Alternatively you can decrease the refresh 
interval for this window in the configuration though having too frequently 
refreshing may impact on performance.

Below the status is a list of recent events that have occurred, by default this 
is a listing of just the last 12 but clicking on 'All' will give you a full list 
and 'Archive' will take you to the event archive for this monitor, more on this 
later. Clicking on any of the column headings will sort the events 
appropriately. From here you can also delete events if you wish. The events 
themselves are listed with the event id, and event name (which you can change), 
the time that the event occurred, the length of the event including any preamble 
and post amble frames, the number of frames comprising the event with the number 
that actually contain an alarm in brackets and finally a score. This column 
lists the average score per alarm frame as well as the maximum score that any 
alarm frame had. The score is an arbitrary value that essentially represents the 
percentage of pixels in the zone that are in blobs divided by the number of 
blobs and then divided by the size of the zone. This gives a nominal maximum of 
100 for a zone and the totals for each zone are added together, Active zones 
scores are added unchanged, Inclusive zones are halved first and Exclusive zones 
are doubled. In reality values are likely to be much less than 100 but it does 
give a simple indication of how major the event was.

Filtering Events
----------------
The other columns on the main console window contain various event totals for 
your monitor over the last hour, day, week and month as well as a grand total 
and a total for events that you may have archived for safekeeping. Clicking on 
one of these totals or on the 'All' or 'Archive' links from the monitor window 
described above will present you with a new display. This is the full event 
window and contains a list of events selected according to a filter which will 
also pop up in its own window. Thus if you clicked on a 'day' total the filter 
will indicate that this is the period for which events are being filtered. The 
event listing window contains a similar listing to the recent events in the 
monitor window. The primary differences are that the frames and alarm frames and 
the score and maximum score are now broken out into their own columns, all of 
which can be sorted by clicking on the heading. Also this window will not 
refresh automatically, rather only on request. Other than that, you can choose 
to view events here or delete them as before. The other window that appeared is 
a filter window. You can use this window to create your own filters or to modify 
existing ones. You can even save your favourite filters to re-use at a future 
date. Filtering itself is fairly simple; you first choose how many expressions 
you'd like your filter to contain. Changing this value will cause the window to 
redraw with a corresponding row for each expression. You then select what you 
want to filter on and how the expressions relate by choosing whether they are 
'and' or 'or' relationships. For filters comprised of many expressions you will 
also get the option to bracket parts of the filter to ensure you can express it 
as desired.

There are several different elements to an event that you can filter on, some of 
which require further explanation. These are as follows, 'Date/Time' which must 
evaluate to a date and a time together, 'Date' and 'Time' which are variants 
which may only contain the relevant subsets of this, 'Weekday' which as expected 
is a day of the week. All of the preceding elements take a very flexible free 
format of dates and time based on the PHP strtotime function 
(http://www.zend.com/manual/function.strtotime.php). This allows values such as 
'last Wednesday' etc to be entered. I recommend acquainting yourself with this 
function to see what the allowed formats are. The other elements you can filter 
on are all fairly self explanatory except perhaps for 'Archived' which you can 
use to include or exclude Archived events. In general you'll probably do most 
filtering on un-archived events. Once your filter is specified, clicking 
'submit' will filter the events according to your specification. If you have 
created a filter you want to keep, you can name it and save it by clicking 
'Save'. If you do this then the subsequent dialog will also allow you specify 
whether you want this filter automatically applied in order to delete events or 
upload events via ftp to another server. This functionality is explained in more 
detail elsewhere. Filtering is a powerful mechanism you can use to eliminate 
events that fit a certain pattern however in many cases modifying the zone 
settings will better address this. Where it really comes into 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.

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. Should you determine 
that you don't wish to keep the event, clicking on Delete will erase it from the 
database and file system. Returning to the event window, other options here are 
renaming the event to something more meaningful, refreshing the window to replay 
the event stream, deleting the event, switching between streamed and still 
versions of the event (if supported) and generating an MPEG video of the event 
(if supported). These last two options require further explanation. Archiving an 
event means that it is kept to one side and not displayed in the normal event 
listings unless you specifically ask to view the archived events. This is useful 
for keeping events that you think may be important or just wish to protect. Once 
an event is archived it can be deleted or unarchived but you cannot accidentally 
delete it when viewing normal unarchived events.

The final option of generating an MPEG video is experimental and not likely to 
be highly useful. It uses the Berkeley MPEG encoder and will generate a short 
video which will be downloaded to your browsing machine to view. Due to the 
relatively slow frame rate that ZM will capture at and the high minimum frame 
rate that the encoder uses, each image is included twice. This has the useful 
effect of making the video watchable and not too quick while having the 
unfortunate side effect of increasing file size and generation time. Building an 
MPEG video, especially for a large event, can take some time and should not be 
undertaken lightly as the effect on your host box of many CPU intensive encoders 
will not be good. However once a video has been created for an event it will be 
kept so subsequent viewing will not incur the generation overhead. I will be the 
first to admit that this area of the package is not particularly well 
implemented and needs work, and probably a better encoder.

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

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

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


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

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

Some things to check.
1. Device configuration. If you can't get your cameras to work in ZM, firstly 
make sure that you have the correct settings. Use xawtv or something like that 
to check for settings that work and then run zmu -d <device_no> to get the
settings. If you can't get them to work with that then the likelihood is they
won't work with ZM.
2. Web server. Ensure that your web server can serve PHP files. It's also 
possible that your php.ini file may have some settings which break ZM, I'm not a 
PHP guru but setting safe mode may prevent your PHP files from running certain 
programs. You may have to set configuration to allow this. Also since the 
daemons are started by your web server, if it dies or is shut down then the 
daemons may disappear. In this version the daemons are run under the control of 
a script which should trap expected signals but it is possible this doesn't 
cover all circumstances.
3. Use debug. ZM has various debug in it that by default will go into your 
system log (via syslog). These will be of the form of
"Sep 14 14:50:11 localhost zma-0[1975]: INF [Front: 221000 - Processing at 4.26 
fps ]"
where the zma-0 part identifies the daemon and the device it is running on. 
Entries with INF in are informational and not an error, if you see ERR then it 
is one, though not all are fatal. You can prevent this information from being 
emitted by setting the DLVL_zmc environment variable to -1 or less once things 
are working. If you want to run any of the daemons from the command line to 
test, setting DBG_PRINT to 1 will output the debug on the console and setting 
DLVL_zmc (or DLVL_zma etc) to a number between 0 and 9 will emit progressively 
more debug though there's not a lot in there at present.
5. Paths. I admit it, the various paths in ZM are a bit of a nightmare. Make 
sure that they are all correct and that permissions are such that the various 
parts of ZM can actually run. Most of the places you need to specify this kind 
of information are at the top of the associated configuration files but I've not 
been able to get the automatic configure script to do all this by itself yet.

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

Whats New
=========

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

Release 0.0.1 - Initial release, therefore nothing new.


To Do
=====

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

1. Sort out the class structure - Frankly it's a bit of a mess at the moment 
with too many 'friends', it needs rationalising.
2. Perhaps split out devices - I think devices should probably be a separate 
table and class from monitors. Not critical but would represent a better model.
3. Comments - Needs many more, but that's just me I'm hopeless at commenting 
things out. I'll get round to it soon though honest! You're lucky to even get 
this document.
4. Optimised zones - The zones could do with being sorted out a bit to optimise 
the processing of overlapping ones, at the moment you can waste resource unless 
your zones are kept very tidy.
5. Create zones using server side image maps - This would make it easier to 
precisely define and see where your zone is going to go. Not critical but handy 
but a bugger to do.
6. Zone Definitions - Allow zones to be defined according to a colour coded 
bitmap or as polygons. Currently all zones are rectangular this would add a bit 
of flexibility. Would need a bit of a rewrite though. This will incur a slight 
penalty on startup and a very slight one on processing for all reasonably shaped 
zones.
7. Security - I think I need to give the php file a bit of a good going over as 
I'm sure it's not done in the most secure way regarding passing things onto 
command line, exposing file paths and other stuff. I'm a bit of a PHP novice, as 
I'm sure you can tell so might need help here. I should have done it in perl!
8. Mouseover help - A bit more help popping up when you mouseover things would 
be handy. A bit more help full stop actually.
9. WAP interface - A bit of a crusade of mine I'm afraid. I'd like to put a WML 
interface on to allow you to view event listing and perhaps the most significant 
image from each event on your phone. Also simple management. In version 0.9.7 
there is a very basic crude initial version that probably won't work with your 
phone but its there as a testbed.
10. Email and SMS notifications - As with the FTP uploads, probably event the 
same daemon to let you know when something happens, perhaps configurable to 
report only certain types of events. This will be a new sort of filter in the 
next version.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Access control should probably be built in rather than relying on .htaccess 
etc.
14. I've got lots of ideas for enhancing the motion detection part with optional 
algorithms etc. Just got to find the time somewhere!
15. Create .rpm packages (as there can be several dependencies) and maybe other 
types of packages also, e.g. for Debian distributions.
16. Allow ZM to 'train' itself by allowing the user to select events that are 
considered important and to discard those that should be ignored. ZM will 
interpolate, add a bit of magic, and recommend settings that will support this 
selection automatically thereafter. The hooks for this are already in to some 
extent.
17. Add quotes to all PHP array references. I should have done it in the first 
place but I'm a perl person really and it kind of bugs me that you have to.


Bugs
====

1. I'm not sure if this is a bug or by design but the timestamp is added to the 
image by the capture daemon. I _think_ this isn't necessary as it may contribute 
to alarms, plus the time is associated with the image anyway. So I think this 
should be moved to the analysis daemon.

Probably bucket loads more, just fire them at me.


Non-Bugs
========

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

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


License
=======

ZoneMinder is released under the GPL, see below.

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

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

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

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