One more Zoneminder/video question (camera resolution)

[Michael Butash]

Hi Jim,

I'm actually using pretty cheapo Skylink wifi-enabled ip cameras (~70
buck fry's specials) with ZM just fine, but I'm also just having it grab
jpg's off it every couple of seconds (NOT actual streaming mpg video).
I was going to try actual video grabs eventually, until I realized just
how much disk space it actually required even for jpg, and the pita
interfacing with the video.  Doing jpg's appears to be a pretty
standard/solid way of getting the images out of IP cameras, at least for
my purposes.

For physical security recap purposes, the jpg solution was actually
better than I had anticipated, without having to figure out a half-ass
solution to interface with kludgey webcode on the camera.  Getting
actual video off them might be rough, as I remember it had some specific
codec limitations.  Mine only supported java or activex (ick) video, so
I figured it was probably on par with ice in az july for getting it to
work anyways.  YMMV...

-mb


On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 15:28 -0700, Jim March wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> First, I have ALL my issues with network access, apache security,
> DynDNS and the like sorted out.  Cool.
> 
> Remaining issue relates to camera resolution:
> 
> I have two Hauppauge BT878 camera interface PCI cards with a total of
> 7 cameras on them. The cameras are Swann cheapos; according to the
> specs on the box they're capable of 510x492 resolution (NTSC).
> 
> In Cheese I can use them at various resolutions (according to the
> "preferences" setting), with the highest at 768x480, although I don't
> believe it's actually running that resolution.  It's damned well
> better than 320x240 (ZoneMinder's max so far!).  There's also a
> 384x286 mode (in cheese) that is still clearly more than the max so
> far I can enter into Zoneminder of 320x240.  Even a bump to 384x286
> would help.
> 
> Telling Zoneminder to drive the cameras at any resolution other than
> 320x240 results in a black screen.
> 
> I'm assuming that all seven screens need to be set for the same
> resolution, and am testing it that way. Setting one screen per card
> different from 320x240 breaks the rest on that card.
> 
> My guess is that Cheese is getting some unknown different resolution
> from the cameras than anything I know about now.
> 
> Is there a command line statement in, say, Xawtv to try and get a
> specific resolution out of the cameras? Something similar to:
> 
> xawtv /dev/video0 res-640x480
> 
> ...or something?
> 
> Any idea why Zoneminder would be stuck hard at 320x240 when the
> cameras are obviously more capable??
> 
> Finally, does anybody have a clue as to which IP WiFi cameras might
> work well with Zoneminder?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Jim
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