Provided by: zoneminder_1.32.3-2ubuntu2_amd64 
NAME
zoneminder - ZoneMinder Documentation
USER GUIDE
Introduction
Welcome to ZoneMinder, the all-in-one security camera solution for Linux with GPL License.
Commercial “security systems” are often designed as a monitoring system with little attention to
recording quality. In such a system, locating and exporting relevant video can be challenging and often
requires extensive human intervention. ZoneMinder was designed to provide the best possible record
quality while allowing easy searching, filtering and exporting of security footage.
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. An outdated Pentium II PC can
have multiple recording devices connected to it, and it is able to track one camera per device at up to
25 frames per second, which drops by approximately half for each additional camera on the same device.
Additional cameras on devices that do not interact with other devices can maintain the 25 frame rate per
second. Monitoring several cameras will not overload the CPU as frame processing is designed to
synchronise with capture.
A fast video interface core, a user-friendly and comprehensive PHP based web interface allows ZoneMinder
to be efficient, friendly and most importantly useful. You can control and monitor your cameras from
home, at work, on the road, or a web-enabled cell phone. It supports variable web capabilities based on
available bandwidth. The web interface also allows you to view events that your cameras have captured,
which can be archived, reviewed or deleted. The web application directly interacts with the core daemons
ensuring full co-operation at all times. ZoneMinder can also be installed as a system service to reboot a
system remotely.
The core of ZoneMinder is the capture and analysis of images and a highly configurable set of parameters
that eliminate false positives whilst ensuring minimum loss of footage. For example, you can define a set
of ‘zones’ for each camera of varying sensitivity and functionality. This eliminates zones 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 free under GPL License, but if you do find it useful, then please feel free to visit
http://www.zoneminder.com/donate.html and help us fund our future improvements.
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.
System Overview
Depicted below is a high level diagram of the ZoneMinder system with key components [image]
A brief description of each of the principle components follows.
Binaries
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.
PHP
As well as this there are the web PHP files in the web directory. Currently these consist of a single
skin with Classic and Flat styles.
Classic
Original ZoneMinder skin
Flat An updated version of Classic skin, retaining the same layout with a more modern style. Originally
a skin this is now just a CSS style.
Perl
Finally 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.
You can either use it ‘as is’ if you can interface with the existing format, or override
connections and channels to customise it to your needs. The format of triggers used by
zmtrigger.pl is as follows “<id>|<action>|<score>|<cause>|<text>|<showtext>” where
• ‘id’ is the id number or name of the ZM monitor.
• ‘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.
• ‘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.
• ‘cause’ is a 32 char max string indicating the reason for, or source of the alarm e.g. ‘Relay 1
open’. This is saved in the ‘Cause’ field of the event. Ignored for ‘off’ or ‘cancel’ messages.
• ‘text’ is a 256 char max additional info field, which is saved in the ‘Description’ field of an
event. Ignored for ‘off’ or ‘cancel’ messages.
• ‘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. This script is
not necessarily intended to be a solution in itself, but is intended to be used as ‘glue’ to help
ZoneMinder interface with other systems. It will almost certainly require some customisation
before you can make any use of it. If all you want to do is generate alarms from external sources
then using the ZoneMinder::SharedMem perl module is likely to be easier.
zmcamtool.pl
This optional script is new for the upcoming 1.27 release of ZoneMinder. It is intended to make it
easy to do the following: bring in new ptz controls and camera presets, convert existing monitors
into presets, and export custom ptz controls and presets. For the initial release, this script is
not integrated into the UI and must be called from the command line. Type ‘’zmcamtool.pl –help’’
from the command line to get an explanation of the different arguments one can pass to the script.
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.
Finally, there are also a number of ZoneMinder perl modules included. These are used by the scripts
above, but can also be used by your own or 3rd party scripts. Full documentation for most modules is
available in ‘pod’ form via ‘perldoc’ but the general purpose of each module is as follows.
ZoneMinder.pm
This is a general ZoneMinder container module. It includes the Base.pm, Config.pm Debug.pm,
Database.pm, and SharedMem.pm modules described below. It also exports all of their symbols by
default. If you use the other modules directly you have request which symbol tags to import.
ZoneMinder/Base.pm
This is the base ZoneMinder perl module. It contains only simple data such as version information.
It is included by all other ZoneMinder perl modules
ZoneMinder/Config.pm
This module imports the ZoneMinder configuration from the database.
ZoneMinder/Debug.pm
This module contains the defined Debug and Error functions etc, that are used by scripts to
produce diagnostic information in a standard format.
ZoneMinder/Database.pm
This module contains database access definitions and functions. Currently not a lot is in this
module but it is included as a placeholder for future development.
ZoneMinder/SharedMem.pm
This module contains standard shared memory access functions. These can be used to access the
current state of monitors etc as well as issuing commands to the monitors to switch things on and
off. This module effectively provides a ZoneMinder API.
ZoneMinder/ConfigAdmin.pm
This module is a specialised module that contains the definition, and other information, about the
various configuration options. It is not intended for use by 3rd parties.
ZoneMinder/Trigger/*.pm
These modules contain definitions of trigger channels and connections used by the zmtrigger.pl
script. Although they can be used ‘as is’, they are really intended as examples that can be
customised or specialised for different interfaces. Contributed modules for new channels or
connections will be welcomed and included in future versions of ZoneMinder.
Getting Started
After installation of Zoneminder you should now be able to load the ZoneMinder web frontend. By default
this will be with the Classic skin, below is an example of the page you should now see. [image]
Enabling Authentication
We strongly recommend enabling authentication right away. There are some situations where certain users
don't enable authentication, such as instances where the server is in a LAN not directly exposed to the
Internet, and is only accessible via VPN etc., but in most cases, authentication should be enabled. So
let's do that right away.
• Click on the Options link on the top right corner of the web interface
• You will now be presented with a screen full of options. Click on the "System" tab
[image]
• The relevant portions to change are marked in red above
• Enable OPT_USE_AUTH - this automatically switches to authentication mode with a default user (more on
that later)
• Select a random string for AUTH_HASH_SECRET - this is used to make the authentication logic more
secure, so please generate your own string and please don't use the same value in the example.
• The other options highlighed above should already be set, but if not, please make sure they are
• Click on Save at the bottom and that's it! The next time you refresh that page, you will now be
presented with a login screen. Job well done!
[image]
NOTE:
The default login/password is "admin/admin"
Switching to flat theme
What you see is what is called a "classic" skin. Zoneminder has a host of configuration options that you
can customize over time. This guide is meant to get you started the easiest possible way, so we will not
go into all the details. However, it is worthwhile to note that Zoneminder also has a 'flat' theme that
depending on your preferences may look more modern. So let's use that as an example of introducing you to
the Options menu
• Click on the Options link on the top right of the web interface in the image above
• This will bring you to the options window as shown below. Click on the "System" tab and then select the
"flat" option for CSS_DEFAULT as shown below
[image]
• Click Save at the bottom
Now, switch to the "Display" tab and also select "Flat" there like so: [image]
Your screen will now look like this:
Congratulations! You now have a modern looking interface. [image]
Understanding the Web Console
Before we proceed, lets spend a few minutes understanding the key functions of the web console. For the
sake of illustration, we are going to use a populated zoneminder configuration with several monitors and
events. Obviously, this does not reflect your current web console - which is essentially void of any
useful information till now, as we are yet to add things. Let's take a small break and understand what
the various functions are before we configure our own empty screen. [image]
• A: This is the username that is logged in. You are logged in as 'admin' here
• B: Click here to explore the various options of ZoneMinder and how to configure them. You already used
this to enable authentication and change style above. Over time, you will find this to have many other
things you will want to customize.
• C: This link, when clicked, opens up a color coded log window of what is going on in Zoneminder and
often gives you good insight into what is going wrong or right. Note that the color here is red - that
is an indication that some error occurred in ZoneMinder. You should click it and investigate.
• D: This is the core of ZoneMinder - recording events. It gives you a count of how many events were
recorded over the hour, day, week, month.
• E: These are the "Zones". Zones are areas within the camera that you mark as 'hotspots' for motion
detection. Simply put, when you first configure your monitors (cameras), by default Zoneminder uses the
entire field of view of the camera to detect motion. You may not want this. You may want to create
"zones" specifically for detecting motion and ignore others. For example, lets consider a room with a
fan that spins. You surely don't want to consider the fan moving continuously a reason for triggering a
record? Probably not - in that case, you'd leave the fan out while making your zones.
• F: This is the "source" column that tells you the type of the camera - if its an IP camera, a USB
camera or more. In this example, they are all IP cameras. Note the color red on item F ? Well that
means there is something wrong with that camera. No wonder the log also shows red. Good indication for
you to tap on logs and investigate
• G: This defines how Zoneminder will record events. There are various modes. In brief Modect == record
if a motion is detected,Record = always record 24x7, Mocord = always record PLUS detect motion,
Monitor = just provide a live view but don't record anytime, Nodect = Don't record till an external
entity via zmtrigger tells Zoneminder to (this is advanced usage).
• H: If you click on these links you can view a "Montage" of all your configured monitors or cycle
through each one
• I: One of the most often missed features is the ability of ZoneMinder to maintain "run states". If you
click on the "Running" text, ZoneMinder brings up a popup that allows you to define additional "states"
(referred to as runstates). A runstate is essentially a snapshot that records the state of each monitor
and you can switch between states easily. For example, you might have a run state defined that switches
all monitors to "monitor" mode in which they are not recording anything while another state that sets
some of the monitors to "modect". Why would you want this? A great example is to disable recording when
you are at home and enable when you are away, based on time of day or other triggers. You can switch
states by selecting an appropriate state manually, or do it automatically via cron jobs, for example.
An example of using cron to automatically switch is provided in the FAQ. More esoteric examples of
switching run states based on phone location can be found here.
Here is an example of multiple run states that I've defined. Each one of these runstates changes the mode
of specific monitors depending on time of day and other conditions. Use your imagination to decide which
conditions require state changes. [image]
Adding Monitors
Now that we have a basic understanding of the web console, lets go about adding a new camera (monitor).
For this example, lets assume we have an IP camera that streams RTSP at LAN IP address 192.168.1.33.
The first thing we will need to know is how to access that camera's video feed. You will need to consult
your camera's manual or check their forum. Zoneminder community users also have a frequently updated list
right here that lists information about many cameras. If you don't find your list there and can't seem to
find it elsewhere, feel free to register and ask in the user foums.
The camera we are using as an example here is a Foscam 9831W which is a 1280x960 RTSP camera, and the URL
to access it's feed is username:password@IPADDRESS:PORT/videoMain
Let's get started:
Click on the "Add new monitor" button below: [image]
This brings up the new monitor window: [image]
• We've given it a name of 'Garage', because, well, its better than Monitor-1 and this is my Garage
camera.
• There are various source types. As a brief introduction you'd want to use 'Local' if your camera is
physically attached to your ZM server (like a USB camera, for example), and one of 'Remote', 'FFMpeg',
'Libvlc' or 'cURL' for a remote camera (not necessarily, but usually). For this example, let's go with
'Remote'.
NOTE:
As a thumb rule, if you have a camera accessible via IP and it does HTTP or RTSP, start with Remote,
then try FFMpeg and libvlc if it doesn't work (/userguide/definemonitor covers other modes in more
details). If you are wondering what 'File' does, well, ZoneMinder was built with compatibility in
mind. Take a look at this post to see how file can be used for leisure reading.
• Let's leave the Function as 'Monitor' just so we can use this as an example to change it later another
way. Practically, feel free to select your mode right now - Modect, Record etc depending on what you
want ZoneMinder to do with this camera
• We've put in MaxFPS and AlarmFPS as 20 here. You can leave this empty too. Whatever you do here, it's
important to make sure these values are higher than the FPS of the camera. The reason we've added a
value here is that as of Aug 2015, if a camera goes offline, ZoneMinder eats up a lot of CPU trying to
reach it and putting a larger value here than the actual FPS helps in that specific situation.
NOTE:
We strongly recommend not putting in a lower FPS here that the one configured inside your camera.
Zoneminder should not be used to manage camera frame rate. That always causes many problems. It's much
better you set the value directly in-camera and either leave this blank or specify a higher FPS here.
In this case, our actual camera FPS is 3 and we've set this value here to 10.
• We are done for the General tab. Let's move to the next tab
[image]
• Let's select a protocol of RTSP and a remote method of RTP/RTSP (this is an RTSP camera)
• The other boxes are mostly self-explanatory
That's pretty much it. Click on Save. We are not going to explore the other tabs in this simple guide.
You now have a configured monitor: [image]
If you want to change its mode from Monitor to say, Modect (Motion Detect), later all you need to do is
click on the Function column that says 'Monitor' and change it to 'Modect' like so: [image]
and we now have: [image]
And then, finally, to see if everything works, lets click on the monitor name ('Garage' in this example)
and that should bring up a live feed just like this: [image]
Conclusion
This was a quick 'Getting Started' guide where you were introduced to the very basics of how to add a
monitor (camera). We've skipped many details to keep this concise. Please refer to
/userguide/definemonitor for many other customization details.
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.
You can access the monitor window by clicking on the “Add New Monitor” button, or by clicking on the
“Source” column of a predefined monitor. [image]
There are a small number of camera setups that ZoneMinder knows about and which can be accessed by
clicking on the ‘Presets’ link. Selecting one of the presets will fill in the monitor configuration with
appropriate values but you will still need to enter others and confirm the preset settings. Here is an
example of the presets window: [image]
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 options 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.
Server Multi-Server implementation allows the ability to define multiple ZoneMinder servers sharing a
single database. When servers are configured this setting allows you nominate the server for each
monitor.
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 Source tab.
Function
This essentially defines what the monitor is doing. This can be one of the following;
• None – The monitor is currently disabled. No streams can be viewed or events generated.
Nothing is recorded.
• Monitor – The monitor is only available for live streaming. No image analysis is done so no
alarms or events will be generated, and nothing will be recorded.
• Modect – or MOtion DEteCTtion. All captured images will be analysed and events generated with
recorded video where motion is detected.
• Record – The monitor will be continuously recorded. Events of a fixed-length will be
generated regardless of motion, analogous to a conventional time-lapse video recorder. No
motion detection takes place in this mode.
• Mocord – The monitor will be continuously recorded, with any motion being highlighted within
those events.
• 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.
Enabled
The enabled field indicates whether the monitor should be started in an active mode or in a more
passive state. You will nearly always want to check this box, the only exceptions being when you
want the camera to be enabled or disabled by external triggers or scripts. If not enabled then the
monitor will not create any events in response to motion or any other triggers.
Linked Monitors
This field allows you to select other monitors on your system that act as triggers for this
monitor. So if you have a camera covering one aspect of your property you can force all cameras to
record while that camera detects motion or other events. You can either directly enter a comma
separated list of monitor ids or click on ‘Select’ to choose a selection. Be very careful not to
create circular dependencies with this feature however you will have infinitely persisting alarms
which is almost certainly not what you want! To unlink monitors you can ctrl-click.
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. This option controls the maximum FPS in the circumstance where no alarm
is occurring only.
This feature is limited and will only work under the following conditions:
1. Local cameras
2. Remote (IP) cameras in snapshot or jpeg mode only
Using this field for video streams from IP cameras will cause undesirable results when the value
is equal to or less than the frame rate from the camera. Note that placing a value higher than the
camera’s frame rate is allowed and can help prevent cpu spikes when communication from the camera
is lost.
Alarm Maximum FPS
If you have specified a Maximum FPS it may be that you don’t want this limitation to apply when
your monitor is recording motion or other event. This setting allows you to override the Maximum
FPS value if this circumstance occurs. As with the Maximum FPS setting leaving this blank implies
no limit so if you have set a maximum fps in the previous option then when an alarm occurs this
limit would be ignored and ZoneMinder would capture as fast as possible for the duration of the
alarm, returning to the limited value after the alarm has concluded. Equally you could set this to
the same, or higher (or even lower) value than Maximum FPS for more precise control over the
capture rate in the event of an alarm.
IMPORTANT: This field is subject to the same limitations as the Maximum FPS field. Ignoring these
limitations will produce undesriable results.
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.
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 Tab
FFmpeg
This is the recommended source type for most modern ip cameras.
Source Path
Use this field to enter the full URL of the stream or file your camera supports. This is usually
an RTSP url. There are several methods to learn this:
• Check the documentation that came with your camera
• Look for your camera in the hardware compatibilty list in the wiki
http://wiki.zoneminder.com/Hardware_Compatibility_List
• Try ZoneMinder’s new ONVIF probe feature
• Download and install the ONVIF Device Manager onto a Windows machine
https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/
• Use Google to find third party sites, such as ispy, which document this information
Source Colours
Specify the amount of colours in the captured image. 32 bit is the preferred choice here. 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
Make sure you enter here the same values as they are in the remote camera’s internal setting.
Keep aspect ratio
As per local devices.
Orientation
As per local devices.
LibVLC
The fields for the LibVLC source type are configured the same way as the ffmpeg source type. We
recommend only using this source type if issues are experienced with the ffmpeg source type.
cURL
Local
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. Look in Supported Hardware section, how to see if your capture card or USB
webcam is supported or not, and what extra settings you may have to do, to make it work.
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 32 bit colour first, then
24 bit colour, then grey. If none of these work very well, and your camera is local, then YUV420P
or one of the others probably will. There is a slight performance penalty when using palettes
other than 32, 24, or grey palettes as an internal conversion is involved. Recent versions of
ZoneMinder support 32bit colour. This capture palette provides a performance boost when used on
all modern Intel-based processors.
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 384x288 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.
Keep aspect ratio
When typing in the dimensions of monitors you can click this checkbox to ensure that the width
stays in the correct ratio to the height, or vice versa. It allows height to be calculated
automatically from width (or vice versa) according to preset aspect ratio. This is preset to 4:3
but can be amended globally via the Options->Config->ZM_DEFAULT_ASPECT_RATIO setting. Aside from
4:3 which is the usual for network and analog cameras another common setting is 11:9 for CIF
(352x288) based sources.
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.
Remote
Remote Protocol
Choices are currently HTTP and RTSP. Before RTSP became the industry standard, many ip cameras
streamed directly from their web portal. If you have an ip camera that does not speak RTSP then
choose HTTP here. If you camera does speak RTSP then you should change your source type to ffmpeg
instead of selecting RTSP here. The Remote -> RTSP method is no longer being maintained and may go
away at some point in the future.
Remote Method
When HTTP is the Remote Protocol, your choices are Simple and Regexp. Most should choose Simple.
When RTSP is the Remote Protocol, your choices are RTP/Unicast, RTP/Multicast, RTP/RTSP,
RTP,RTSP,HTTP. Try each of these to determine which works with your camera. Most cameras will use
either RTP/Unicast (UDP) or RTP/RTSP (TCP).
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.jpg 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 32 or 24 bit colour even if
the image looks black and white. Look in Supported Hardware > Network Cameras section, how to
obtain these strings that may apply to your camera.
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
Make sure you enter here the same values as they are in the remote camera’s internal setting.
Keep aspect ratio
As per local devices.
Orientation
As per local devices.
For an example to setup a MPEG-4 camera see: How_to_Setup_an_Axis211A_with_MPEG-4_streaming
File
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 32 bit colour.
Capture Width/Height
As per local devices.
Keep aspect ratio
As per local devices.
Orientation
As per local devices.
WebSite
This Source Type allows one to configure an arbitrary website as a non-recordable, fully interactive,
monitor in ZoneMinder. Note that sites with self-signed certificates will not display until the end user
first manually navigates to the site and accpets the unsigned certificate. Also note that some sites will
set an X-Frame option in the header, which discourages their site from being displayed within a frame.
ZoneMinder will detect this condition and present a warning in the log. When this occurs, the end user
can choose to install a browser plugin or extension to workaround this issue.
Website URL
Enter the full http or https url to the desired website.
Width (pixels)
Chose a desired width in pixels that gives an acceptable appearance. This may take some
expirimentation.
Height (pixels)
Chose a desired height in pixels that gives an acceptable appearance. This may take some
expirimentation.
Web Site Refresh
If the website in question has static content, optionally enter a time period in seconds for
ZoneMinder to refresh the content.
Storage Tab
The storage section allows for each monitor to configure if and how video and audio are recorded.
Save JPEGs
Records video in individual JPEG frames. Storing JPEG frames requires more storage space than h264
but it allows to view an event anytime while it is being recorded.
• Disabled – video is not recorded as JPEG frames. If this setting is selected, then “Video
Writer” should be enabled otherwise there is no video recording at all.
• Frames only – video is recorded in individual JPEG frames.
• Analysis images only (if available) – video is recorded in invidual JPEG frames with an overlay
of the motion detection analysis information. Note that this overlay remains permanently visible
in the frames.
• Frames + Analysis images (if available) – video is recorded twice, once as normal individual
JPEG frames and once in invidual JPEG frames with analysis information overlaid.
Video Writer
Records video in real video format. It provides much better compression results than saving JPEGs,
thus longer video history can be stored.
• Disabled – video is not recorded in video format. If this setting is selected, then “Save JPEGs”
should be enabled otherwise there is no video recording at all.
• X264 Encode – the video or picture frames received from the camera are transcoded into h264 and
stored as a video. This option is useful if the camera cannot natively stream h264.
• H264 Camera Passthrough – this option assumes that the camera is already sending an h264 stream.
Video will be recorded as is, without any post-processing in zoneminder. Video characteristics
such as bitrate, encoding mode, etc. should be set directly in the camera.
Recording Audio
Check the box labeled “Whether to store the audio stream when saving an event.” in order to save
audio (if available) when events are recorded.
Timestamp Tab
Timestamp Label Format
This relates to the timestamp that is applied to each frame. It is a ‘strftime’ style string with
a few extra tokens. You can add %f to add the decimal hundredths of a second to the frame
timestamp, so %H:%M:%S.%f will output time like 10:45:37.45. You can also use %N for the name of
the monitor and %Qwhich 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.
Stream Replay Image Buffer
The number of frames buffered to allow pausing and rewinding of the stream when live viewing a
monitor. A value of 0 disables the feature. Frames are buffered to ZM_PATH_SWAP. If this path
points to a physical drive, a lot of IO will be caused during live view / montage. If you
experience high system load in those situations, either disable the feature or use a RAM drive for
ZM_PATH_SWAP.
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.
Control Tab
Note: This tab and its options will only appear if you have selected the ZM_OPT_CONTROL option to
indicate 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (the default zone is the full area
captured by the 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. The colour of the zones appearing here is determined by what type they
are. The default zone is Active and so will be red, Inclusive zones are orange, exclusive zones are
purple, preclusive zones are blue and inactive zones are white.
Beneath the zones image 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. For more information on defining or editing a zone, see Defining
Zones.
Zone configuration and tuning are important when running in the motion detection modes to avoid storing,
sorting through, or being alerted on uninteresting video data. Configuring a zone involves setting some
basic parameters, as well as choosing an alarm check method and tuning their associated detection
parameters.
The Zone view is split into two main areas, on the left is the options are area and on the right is the
zone drawing area. A default or new zone will cover the whole drawing area and will overlay any other
zones you already have on there. Unlike the previous zones image, the current zone is coloured green,
other zones will be orange regardless of type. The smaller the zone, the less processing time it takes to
examine it.
Basic parameters
Name Each Zone can be named for reference purposes. It is used for logging and debugging. Choose a
name that helps you identify your zones.
Type This is one of the more important concepts in ZoneMinder and there are six to choose from.
• Active Triggers an alarm when motion is detected within it. This is the zone type you’ll use
most often, and which will be set for your default zone. Only Active and Exclusive zones can
trigger an alarm.
• 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 Triggers an alarm when motion is detected within it, as long as no alarms have already
been triggered in an Active zone. This is the most specialized of the zone types. 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. Preclusive zones may also be used to reduce processing time by
situating one over an Active zone. The Preclusive zone is processed first; if it is small, and
is triggered, the rest of the zone/image will not be processed.
• Inactive Suppresses the detection of motion within it. This can be layered on top of any other
zone type, preventing motion within the Inactive zone from being effective for any other zone
type. Use inactive zones to cover areas in which nothing notable will ever happen or where you
get false alarms that don’t relate to what you are trying to monitor. Inactive zones may be
overlaid on other zones to blank out areas, and are processed first (with the exception of
Privacy zones, see below). As a general practice, you should try and make zones abut each other
instead of overlapping to avoid repeated duplicate processing of the same area.
• Privacy Blackens the pixels within it. This can be used if you want to hide some regions in the
image if the situation does not allow another solution. This zone type is different to all the
others in that it gets processed as soon as possible during capture (even before the timestamp
gets into the image) and not in the analyzing process. So if you add, change or delete a Privacy
zone, you don’t see the changes in the image until the capture process gets restarted. This will
be done automatically, but needs a few seconds.
Preset The preset chooser sets sensible default values based on computational needs (fast v. best) and
sensitivity (low, medium, high.) It is not required that you select a preset, and you can alter
any of the parameters after choosing a preset. For a small number of monitors with ZoneMinder
running on modern equipment, Best, high sensitivity can be chosen as a good starting point.
It is important to understand that the available presets are intended merely as a starting point.
Since every camera’s view is unique, they are not guaranteed to work properly in every case.
Presets tend to work acceptably for indoor cameras, where the objects of interest are relatively
close and there typically are few or no unwanted objects moving within the cameras view. Presets,
on the other hand, tend to not work acceptably for outdoor cameras, where the field of view is
typically much wider, objects of interest are farther away, and changing weather patterns can
cause false triggers. For outdoor cameras in particular, you will almost certainly have to tune
your motion detection zone to get desired results. Please refer to this guide to learn how to do
this.
Units
• Pixels - Selecting this option will allow many of the following values to be entered (or viewed)
in units of pixels.
• Percentage - Selecting this option will allow may of the following values to be entered (or
viewed) as a percentage. The sense of the percentage values refers to the area of the zone and
not the image as a whole. This makes trying to work out necessary sizes rather easier.
Region points [image]
The sample region shown to the right shows a region defined by 6 control points. The shape of the region
causes the check methods to ignore the sidewalk and areas of the porch wall that receive changing
sunlight; two conditions that are not of interest in this zone.
A region is a part of the captured image that is of interest for this zone. By default, a region is
configured to cover the whole captured image. Depending on the selected type of this zone, the shape
of the region can be adjusted to accommodate multiple effects. This can be done by dragging the
control points in the reference image around, or by altering the coordinates found in the controls
below the reference image. Clicking on a control point in the reference image highlights the
coordinates in the table below. Clicking the + button in a point row adds a control point between
this point and the next; clicking the - button removes this control point. It is possible to
accidentally place a control point outside of the valid coordinates of the image. This will prevent
the monitor from working properly. You can make zones almost any shape you like; except that zones
may not self-intersect (i.e. edges crossing over each other).
Alarm Colour
These parameters can be used to individually colorize the zone overlay pattern. Alarms in this
zone will be highlighted in the alarm colour. This option is irrelevant for Preclusive and
Inactive zones and will be disabled.
Alarm Check Methods
There are 3 Alarm Check Methods. They are sequential, and are layered: In AlarmedPixels mode,
only the AlarmedPixel analysis is performed. In FilteredPixels mode, the AlarmedPixel analysis is
performed first, followed by the FilteredPixel analysis. In the Blobs mode, all 3 analysis
methods are performed in order. An alarm is only triggered if all of the enabled analysis modes
are triggered. For performance reasons, as soon as the criteria for one of the analysis modes is
not met, the alarm checking for the frame is complete. Since the subsequent modes each require
progressively more computations, it is a good idea to tune the parameters in each of the activated
layers.
For reference purposes, the Zone Area box shows the area of the entire region of interest. In
percent mode, this is 100. In Pixels mode, this is the pixel count of the region. All 3 Min/Max
Area parameter groups are based on the Zone Area as the maximum sensible value, and all 3 are
interpreted in the units specified in the Units input.
AlarmedPixels
Alarmed pixels is the first layer of analysis, and is always enabled. Its recommended that you
start with this method and move on to the subsequent methods once the effects of the basic
parameters are understood. In the AlarmedPixels mode, 2 parameter categories are available for
tuning: Min/Max Pixel Threshold, and Min/Max Alarmed Area.
Min/Max Pixel Threshold (0-255)
In the AlarmedPixel layer of analysis, each individual pixel of the image is compared to the
current reference image. Pixels that are different from the reference image are considered
alarmed pixels. However, small aberrations in lighting or auto exposure camera adjustments may
cause the explicit value of a pixel to vary by small amounts from image to image. This parameter
allows you to set the limits of what will be considered a changed pixel. For example, if your
camera points to a blank white wall, and you raise a black colored item into view, then the change
in any one pixel will be great, indeed, extreme. If however, you raise a white piece of paper,
then the change in an individual pixel will be less.
The minimum pixel threshold setting should be high enough to cause minor lighting, imaging, or
compression changes to be ignored. Setting the minimum value too high, may allow a white cat to
walk undetected across the view of the white wall. A good starting point for the minimum pixel
threshold is 40, meaning that the difference in pixel value from must be greater than 40. A good
default for the maximum pixel threshold is 0 (indicating that all differences above the minimum
threshold are considered a change.)
Min/Max Alarmed Area
The count of alarmed pixels (or percentage of alarmed pixels relative to the pixel area of the
region if in percent mode) is used in this first layer of analysis to determine if an alarm is
triggered. If the count or percentage is above the minimum alarmed area, but less than the
maximum alarmed area, an alarm is triggered. These settings depend on the size of the object you
are trying to capture: a value too low may cause false alarms, while a value too high might not
detect small objects. A good starting point for both the minimum and maximum are 0 and 0,
indicating that any number of alarmed pixels (or any percentage) greater than 0 will trigger an
alarm. The frame scores from logged events can then be used to bring the minimum up to a
reasonable value. An alternative starting point for the minimum alarmed area (in percent) is 25%
of the area that an object of interest takes up in the region. For example, if you approximate
that a subject moving through the frame takes up 30% of the frame, then a good starting minimum
area is about 7.5%.
FilteredPixels
Selecting the FilteredPixels Alarm Check Method adds an additional layer of analysis to the
AlarmedPixels check along with 2 additional parameter categories for tuning. This layer works by
analyzing the alarmed pixels identified in the first layer. Alarmed pixels are disregarded, in
this and future layers if enabled, if they are not in groups of a minimum small square size.
Primarily, this filtering removes isolated alarmed pixels that may be artifacts of the camera,
lens, or compression.
Filter Width/Height (pixels)
This parameter is always specified in Pixels, even when Percentages are the selected units. It
specifies the size of the group of pixels surrounding a given pixel that must be in alarmed pixels
for the pixel itself to be considered an alarmed pixel. The width and height should always be an
odd number. 3 x 3 is the default value, and 5 x 5 is also suggested as a sensible alternative.
Avoid using large numbers for the width and height of the filter area. When using the Blobs Alarm
Check Method, FilteredPixels can be effectively disabled by setting either the width or height to
a value less than 1.
Min/Max Filtered Area
Applying the filtering analysis results in an area that is less than or equal to the alarmed area.
Thus the minimum and maximum filtered area parameters for alarm should be equal to or less than
the corresponding alarm area parameters, or the FilteredPixels analysis will never trigger an
alarm. In particular, it is useful to raise the minimum alarmed area parameter until false events
from image artifacts disappear, and setting a minimum filtered area parameter less the minimum
alarmed area parameter by enough to capture small events of interest.
Blobs [image]
This image shows an image with 1 identified blob. The blob is outlined in the Alarm Colour specified
above.
When two or more Filtered areas touch or share a boundary, it is sensible to evaluate the regions as one
contiguous area instead of separate entities. A Blob is a contiguous area made up of multiple filtered
areas. Whereas FilteredPixes is useful for excluding parts of the image that are not part of the actual
scene, Blob filtering is better suited to disregarding areas of the actual scene that are not of
interest.
Selecting the Blobs Alarm Check Method opens up all of the available parameters. Enabling Blobs adds
one more layer of analysis to the AlarmedPixel and FilteredPixel checks in the determination of a
valid alarm along along with 2 additional parameter categories for tuning: the size of the blobs, and
the number of blobs. A Blob is not necessarily the whole object that may be of interest. In the
example image, the subject is moving, but only a portion of him is marked as a blob. This is because
as the subject moves, many pixels of the image do not change in value beyond the set threshold. A
pixel that is representing the subject’s shoulder in one frame may be representing his back in the
next, however, the value of the pixel remains nearly the same.
Min/Max Blob Area
The blob area parameters control the smallest and largest contiguous areas that are to be
considered a blob. A good value for the maximum area is the default of 0. (There is no upper
bound for the size of a contiguous area that will still be considered a blob.)
Min/Max Blobs
Normally, you would want any positive number of blobs to trigger an event, so the default value of
1 should suffice. In some circumstances, it may benefit to have only one blob NOT trigger an
event, in which case, setting this value to 2 or higher may serve some special purpose. A good
value for the maximum blobs is the default of 0. (There is no upper bound for the number of blobs
that will trigger an event. Use the maximum blobs parameter can be used to tune out events that
show a high number of blobs.
Overload Frame Ignore Count
This setting specifies the number of frames to NOT raise an alarm after an overload. In this
context, overload is defined as a detected change too big to raise an alarm. Depending on the
alarm check method that could be * Number of alarmed pixels > Max Alarmed Area or * Number of
filtered pixels > Max Filtered Area or * Number of Blobs > Max Blobs The idea is that after a
change like a light going on that is considered too big to count as an alarm, it could take a
couple of frames for things to settle down again.
Other information
Refer to this user contributed Zone guide for additional information will illustrations if you are new to
zones and need more help.
Viewing Monitors
ZoneMinder allows you to view a live feed of your configured monitors. One can access this view by
clicking on the “Name” column of any of the monitors [image]
Clicking on the name produces a view similar to this: [image]
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.
Filtering Events
Filters allow you to define complex conditions with associated actions in ZoneMinder. Examples could
include:
• Send an email each time a new event occurs for a specific monitor
• Delete events that are more than 10 days old
And many more.
The filter window can be accessed from various views, one of which is to simply tap on the filter button
in the main web view: [image]
You can use the filter 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.
Here is what the filter window looks like [image]
• A: This is a dropdown list where you can select pre-defined filters. You will notice that ZoneMinder
comes with a PurgeWhenFull filter that is configured to delete events if you reach 95% of disk space.
• B and C: This is where you specify conditions that need to match before the filter is executed. You use
the “+” and “-” buttons to add/delete conditions
•
D: This is where you specify what needs to happen when the conditions match:
• Archive all matches: sets the archive field to 1 in the Database for the matched events.
Think of ‘archiving’ as grouping them under a special category - you can view archived events
later and also make sure archived events don’t get deleted, for example
• Email details of all matches: Sends an email to the configured address with details about the
event. The email can be customized as per TBD
• Execute command on all matches: Allows you to execute any arbitrary command on the matched
events. You can use replacement tokens as subsequent arguents to the command, the last
argument will be the absolute path to the event, preceeded by replacement arguents. eg:
/usr/bin/script.sh %MN% will excecute as /usr/bin/script.sh MonitorName /path/to/event.
• Delete all matches: Deletes all the matched events
• E: Use ‘Submit’ to ‘test’ your matching conditions. This will just match and show you what filters
match. Use ‘Execute’ to actually execute the action after matching your conditions. Use ‘Save’ to save
the filter for future use and ‘Reset’ to clear your settings
NOTE:
More details on filter conditions:
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. We 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 things 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. Emails and messages (essentially small emails
intended for mobile phones or pagers) have a format defined in the Options screen, and may include 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. Be aware that tokens that represent links may require you to log in to access the
actual page, and sometimes may function differently when viewed outside of the general ZoneMinder
context. The tokens you can use are as follows.
• %EI% Id of the event
• %EN% Name of the event
• %EC% Cause of the event
• %ED% Event description
• %ET% Time of the event
• %EL% Length of the event
• %EF% Number of frames in the event
• %EFA% Number of alarm frames in the event
• %EST% Total score of the event
• %ESA% Average score of the event
• %ESM% Maximum score of the event
• %EP% Path to the event
• %EPS% Path to the event stream
• %EPI% Path to the event images
• %EPI1% Path to the first alarmed event image
• %EPIM% Path to the (first) event image with the highest score
• %EI1% Attach first alarmed event image
• %EIM% Attach (first) event image with the highest score
• %EV% Attach event mpeg video
• %MN% Name of the monitor
• %MET% Total number of events for the monitor
• %MEH% Number of events for the monitor in the last hour
• %MED% Number of events for the monitor in the last day
• %MEW% Number of events for the monitor in the last week
• %MEM% Number of events for the monitor in the last month
• %MEA% Number of archived events for the monitor
• %MP% Path to the monitor window
• %MPS% Path to the monitor stream
• %MPI% Path to the monitor recent image
• %FN% Name of the current filter that matched
• %FP% Path to the current filter that matched
• %ZP% Path to your ZoneMinder console
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 all
matches’ option. This will then run in the background and ensure that your disk does not fill up with
events.
Saving filters
[image]
When saving filters, if you want the filter to run in the background make sure you select the “Run filter
in background” option. When checked, ZoneMinder will make sure the filter is checked regularly. For
example, if you want to be notified of new events by email, you should make sure this is checked. Filters
that are configured to run in the background have a “*” next to it.
For example: [image]
How filters actually work
It is useful to know how filters actually work behind the scenes in ZoneMinder, in the event you find
your filter not functioning as intended:
• the primary filter processing process in ZoneMinder is a perl file called zmfilter.pl which retrieves
filters from the Filters database table
• zmfilter.pl runs every FILTER_EXECUTE_INTERVAL seconds (default is 20s, can be changed in
Options->System)
• in each run, it goes through all the filters which are marked as “Run in Background” and if the
conditions match performs the specified action
•
zmfilter.pl also reloads all the filters every FILTER_RELOAD_DELAY seconds (default is 300s/5mins, can
be changed in Options->System)
• So if you have just created a new filter, zmfilter will not see it till the next
FILTER_RELOAD_DELAY cycle
• This is also important if you are using “relative times” like ‘now’ - see Caveat with Relative
items
Relative items in date strings
Relative items adjust a date (or the current date if none) forward or backward. The effects of relative
items accumulate. Here are some examples:
* 1 year
* 1 year ago
* 3 years
* 2 days
The unit of time displacement may be selected by the string ‘year’ or ‘month’ for moving by whole years
or months. These are fuzzy units, as years and months are not all of equal duration. More precise units
are ‘fortnight’ which is worth 14 days, ‘week’ worth 7 days, ‘day’ worth 24 hours, ‘hour’ worth 60
minutes, ‘minute’ or ‘min’ worth 60 seconds, and ‘second’ or ‘sec’ worth one second. An ‘s’ suffix on
these units is accepted and ignored.
The unit of time may be preceded by a multiplier, given as an optionally signed number. Unsigned numbers
are taken as positively signed. No number at all implies 1 for a multiplier. Following a relative item by
the string ‘ago’ is equivalent to preceding the unit by a multiplier with value -1.
The string ‘tomorrow’ is worth one day in the future (equivalent to ‘day’), the string ‘yesterday’ is
worth one day in the past (equivalent to ‘day ago’).
The strings ‘now’ or ‘today’ are relative items corresponding to zero-valued time displacement, these
strings come from the fact a zero-valued time displacement represents the current time when not otherwise
changed by previous items. They may be used to stress other items, like in ‘12:00 today’. The string
‘this’ also has the meaning of a zero-valued time displacement, but is preferred in date strings like
‘this thursday’.
When a relative item causes the resulting date to cross a boundary where the clocks were adjusted,
typically for daylight saving time, the resulting date and time are adjusted accordingly.
The fuzz in units can cause problems with relative items. For example, ‘2003-07-31 -1 month’ might
evaluate to 2003-07-01, because 2003-06-31 is an invalid date. To determine the previous month more
reliably, you can ask for the month before the 15th of the current month. For example:
$ date -R
Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:02:39 -0700
$ date --date='-1 month' +'Last month was %B?'
Last month was July?
$ date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-15) -1 month" +'Last month was %B!'
Last month was June!
As this applies to ZoneMinder filters, you might want to search for events in a period of time, or maybe
for example create a purge filter that removes events older than 30 days. For the later you would want
at least two lines in your filter. The first line should be:
[<Archive Status> <equal to> <Unarchived Only>]
as you don’t want to delete your archived events.
Your second line to find events older than 30 days would be:
[and <Date><less than> -30 days]
You use “less than” to indicate that you want to match events before the specified date, and you specify
“-30 days” to indicate a date 30 days before the time the filter is run. Of course you could use 30 days
ago as well(?).
You should always test your filters before enabling any actions based on them to make sure they
consistently return the results you want. You can use the submit button to see what events are returned
by your query.
Caveat with Relative items
One thing to remember if you specify relative dates like “now” or “1 minute ago”, etc, they are converted
to a specific date and time by Zoneminder’s filtering process (zmfilter.pl) when the filters are loaded.
They are _NOT_ recomputed each time the filter runs. Filters are re-loaded depending on the value
specified by FILTER_RELOAD_DELAY variable in the Zoneminder Web Console->Options->System
This may cause confusion in the following cases, for example: Let’s say a user specifies that he wants to
be notified of events via email the moment the event “DateTime” is “less than” “now” as a filter
criteria. When the filter first gets loaded by zmfilter.pl, this will translate to “Match events where
Start Time < ” + localtime() where local time is the time that is resolved when this filter gets loaded.
Now till the time the filter gets reloaded after FILTER_RELOAD_DELAY seconds (which is usually set to 300
seconds, or 5 minutes), that time does not get recomputed, so the filter will not process any new events
that occur after that computed date till another 5 minutes, which is probably not what you want.
Troubleshooting tips
If your filter is not working, here are some useful tips:
• Look at Info and Debug logs in Zoneminder
• Run sudo zmfilter.pl -f <yourfiltername> from command line and see the log output
• Check how long your action is taking - zmfilter.pl will wait for the action to complete before it
checks again
• If you are using relative times like ‘now’ or ‘1 year ago’ etc. remember that zmfilter converts that
relative time to an absolute date only when it reloads filters, which is dictated by the
FILTER_RELOAD_DELAY duration. So, for example, if you are wondering why your events are not being
detected before intervals of 5 minutes and you have used such a relative condition, this is why
• In the event that you see your new filter is working great when you try it out from the Web Console
(using the Submit or Execute button) but does not seem to work when its running in background mode, you
might have just chanced upon a compatibility issue between how Perl and PHP translate free form text to
dates/times. When you test it via the “Submit” or “Execute” button, you are invoking a PHP function for
time conversion. When the filter runs in background mode, zmfilter.pl calls a perl equivalent function.
In some cases, depending on the version of Perl and PHP you have, the results may vary. If you face
this situation, the best thing to do is to run sudo zmfilter.pl -f <yourfiltername> from a terminal to
make sure the filter actually works in Perl as well.
Viewing Events
From the monitor or filtered events listing you can now click on an event to view it in more detail.
This is an example view that shows events for a specific monitor: [image]
If you have streaming capability you will see a series of images that make up the event. Under that you
should also see a progress bar. Depending on your configuration this will either be static or will be
filled in to indicate how far through the event you are. By default this functionality is turned off for
low bandwidth settings as the image delivery tends to not be able to keep up with real-time and the
progress bar cannot take this into account. Regardless of whether the progress bar updates, you can click
on it to navigate to particular points in the events.
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.
Here is an example of viewing an event stream: [image]
• A: Administrative Event options on the event including viewing individual frames
• B: The actual image stream
• C: Navigation control
• D: You can switch between watching a single event or Continuous mode (where it advances to the next
event after playback is complete)
• E: Event progress bar - how much of the current event has been played back
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.
More details on the Administrative Event options (A)
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 uses the open source ffmpeg encoder to generate short videos, which will be downloaded to your
browsing machine or viewed in place. When using the ffmpeg encoder, ZoneMinder will attempt to match the
duration of the video with the duration of the event. Ffmpeg 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. A common value for FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS under Options > Images might be '-r 25 -b 800k' for 25
fps and 800 kbps. 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.
Options
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.
Options - Display
[image]
This option screen allows user to select the skin for ZoneMinder. Currently available skins are:
• Classic
• Flat
• XML (Deprecated in favour of web/API)
• Mobile (Deprecated)
Options - System
[image]
LANG_DEFAULT - ZoneMinder allows the web interface to use languages other than English if the appropriate
language file has been created and is present. This option allows you to change the default language that
is used from the shipped language, British English, to another language.
OPT_USE_AUTH - ZoneMinder can run in two modes. The simplest is an entirely unauthenticated mode where
anyone can access ZoneMinder and perform all tasks. This is most suitable for installations where the web
server access is limited in other ways. The other mode enables user accounts with varying sets of
permissions. Users must login or authenticate to access ZoneMinder and are limited by their defined
permissions. Authenticated mode alone should not be relied up for securing Internet connected ZoneMinder.
AUTH_TYPE - ZoneMinder can use two methods to authenticate users when running in authenticated mode. The
first is a builtin method where ZoneMinder provides facilities for users to log in and maintains track of
their identity. The second method allows interworking with other methods such as http basic
authentication which passes an independently authentication ‘remote’ user via http. In this case
ZoneMinder would use the supplied user without additional authentication provided such a user is
configured ion ZoneMinder.
AUTH_RELAY - When ZoneMinder is running in authenticated mode it can pass user details between the web
pages and the back end processes. There are two methods for doing this. This first is to use a time
limited hashed string which contains no direct username or password details, the second method is to pass
the username and passwords around in plaintext. This method is not recommend except where you do not have
the md5 libraries available on your system or you have a completely isolated system with no external
access. You can also switch off authentication relaying if your system is isolated in other ways.
AUTH_HASH_SECRET - When ZoneMinder is running in hashed authenticated mode it is necessary to generate
hashed strings containing encrypted sensitive information such as usernames and password. Although these
string are reasonably secure the addition of a random secret increases security substantially.
AUTH_HASH_IPS - When ZoneMinder is running in hashed authenticated mode it can optionally include the
requesting IP address in the resultant hash. This adds an extra level of security as only requests from
that address may use that authentication key. However in some circumstances, such as access over mobile
networks, the requesting address can change for each request which will cause most requests to fail. This
option allows you to control whether IP addresses are included in the authentication hash on your system.
If you experience intermitent problems with authentication, switching this option off may help.
AUTH_HASH_LOGINS - The normal process for logging into ZoneMinder is via the login screen with username
and password. In some circumstances it may be desirable to allow access directly to one or more pages,
for instance from a third party application. If this option is enabled then adding an ‘auth’ parameter to
any request will include a shortcut login bypassing the login screen, if not already logged in. As
authentication hashes are time and, optionally, IP limited, this can allow short-term access to
ZoneMinder screens from other web pages etc. In order to use this, the calling application will have to
generate the authentication hash itself and ensure it is valid. If you use this option you should ensure
that you have modified the ZM_AUTH_HASH_SECRET to something unique to your system.
OPT_FAST_DELETE - Normally an event created as the result of an alarm consists of entries in one or more
database tables plus the various files associated with it. When deleting events in the browser it can
take a long time to remove all of this if your are trying to do a lot of events at once. It is
recommended that you set this option which means that the browser client only deletes the key entries in
the events table, which means the events will no longer appear in the listing, and leaves the zmaudit
daemon to clear up the rest later.
FILTER_RELOAD_DELAY - ZoneMinder allows you to save filters to the database which allow events that match
certain criteria to be emailed, deleted or uploaded to a remote machine etc. The zmfilter daemon loads
these and does the actual operation. This option determines how often in seconds the filters are reloaded
from the database to get the latest versions or new filters. If you don’t change filters very often this
value can be set to a large value.
FILTER_EXECUTE_INTERVAL - ZoneMinder allows you to save filters to the database which allow events that
match certain criteria to be emailed, deleted or uploaded to a remote machine etc. The zmfilter daemon
loads these and does the actual operation. This option determines how often the filters are executed on
the saved event in the database. If you want a rapid response to new events this should be a smaller
value, however this may increase the overall load on the system and affect performance of other elements.
MAX_RESTART_DELAY - The zmdc (zm daemon control) process controls when processeses are started or stopped
and will attempt to restart any that fail. If a daemon fails frequently then a delay is introduced
between each restart attempt. If the daemon stills fails then this delay is increased to prevent extra
load being placed on the system by continual restarts. This option controls what this maximum delay is.
WATCH_CHECK_INTERVAL - The zmwatch daemon checks the image capture performance of the capture daemons to
ensure that they have not locked up (rarely a sync error may occur which blocks indefinitely). This
option determines how often the daemons are checked.
WATCH_MAX_DELAY - The zmwatch daemon checks the image capture performance of the capture daemons to
ensure that they have not locked up (rarely a sync error may occur which blocks indefinitely). This
option determines the maximum delay to allow since the last captured frame. The daemon will be restarted
if it has not captured any images after this period though the actual restart may take slightly longer in
conjunction with the check interval value above.
RUN_AUDIT - The zmaudit daemon exists to check that the saved information in the database and on the
filesystem match and are consistent with each other. If an error occurs or if you are using ‘fast
deletes’ it may be that database records are deleted but files remain. In this case, and similar, zmaudit
will remove redundant information to synchronise the two data stores. This option controls whether
zmaudit is run in the background and performs these checks and fixes continuously. This is recommended
for most systems however if you have a very large number of events the process of scanning the database
and filesystem may take a long time and impact performance. In this case you may prefer to not have
zmaudit running unconditionally and schedule occasional checks at other, more convenient, times.
AUDIT_CHECK_INTERVAL - The zmaudit daemon exists to check that the saved information in the database and
on the filesystem match and are consistent with each other. If an error occurs or if you are using ‘fast
deletes’ it may be that database records are deleted but files remain. In this case, and similar, zmaudit
will remove redundant information to synchronise the two data stores. The default check interval of 900
seconds (15 minutes) is fine for most systems however if you have a very large number of events the
process of scanning the database and filesystem may take a long time and impact performance. In this case
you may prefer to make this interval much larger to reduce the impact on your system. This option
determines how often these checks are performed.
OPT_CONTROL - ZoneMinder includes limited support for controllable cameras. A number of sample protocols
are included and others can easily be added. If you wish to control your cameras via ZoneMinder then
select this option otherwise if you only have static cameras or use other control methods then leave this
option off.
OPT_TRIGGERS - ZoneMinder can interact with external systems which prompt or cancel alarms. This is done
via the zmtrigger.pl script. This option indicates whether you want to use these external triggers. Most
people will say no here.
CHECK_FOR_UPDATES - From ZoneMinder version 1.17.0 onwards new versions are expected to be more frequent.
To save checking manually for each new version ZoneMinder can check with the zoneminder.com website to
determine the most recent release. These checks are infrequent, about once per week, and no personal or
system information is transmitted other than your current version number. If you do not wish these checks
to take place or your ZoneMinder system has no internet access you can switch these check off with this
configuration variable
UPDATE_CHECK_PROXY - If you use a proxy to access the internet then ZoneMinder needs to know so it can
access zoneminder.com to check for updates. If you do use a proxy enter the full proxy url here in the
form of http://<proxy host>:<proxy port>/
SHM_KEY - ZoneMinder uses shared memory to speed up communication between modules. To identify the right
area to use shared memory keys are used. This option controls what the base key is, each monitor will
have it’s Id or’ed with this to get the actual key used. You will not normally need to change this value
unless it clashes with another instance of ZoneMinder on the same machine. Only the first four hex digits
are used, the lower four will be masked out and ignored.
Options - Config
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TIMESTAMP_ON_CAPTURE - ZoneMinder can add a timestamp to images in two ways. The default method, when
this option is set, is that each image is timestamped immediately when captured and so the image held in
memory is marked right away. The second method does not timestamp the images until they are either saved
as part of an event or accessed over the web. The timestamp used in both methods will contain the same
time as this is preserved along with the image. The first method ensures that an image is timestamped
regardless of any other circumstances but will result in all images being timestamped even those never
saved or viewed. The second method necessitates that saved images are copied before being saved otherwise
two timestamps perhaps at different scales may be applied. This has the (perhaps) desirable side effect
that the timestamp is always applied at the same resolution so an image that has scaling applied will
still have a legible and correctly scaled timestamp.
CPU_EXTENSIONS - When advanced processor extensions such as SSE2 or SSSE3 are available, ZoneMinder can
use them, which should increase performance and reduce system load. Enabling this option on processors
that do not support the advanced processors extensions used by ZoneMinder is harmless and will have no
effect.
FAST_IMAGE_BLENDS - To detect alarms ZoneMinder needs to blend the captured image with the stored
reference image to update it for comparison with the next image. The reference blend percentage specified
for the monitor controls how much the new image affects the reference image. There are two methods that
are available for this. If this option is set then fast calculation which does not use any multiplication
or division is used. This calculation is extremely fast, however it limits the possible blend percentages
to 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 6.25%, 3.25% and 1.5%. Any other blend percentage will be rounded to the nearest
possible one. The alternative is to switch this option off and use standard blending instead, which is
slower.
OPT_ADAPTIVE_SKIP - In previous versions of ZoneMinder the analysis daemon would attempt to keep up with
the capture daemon by processing the last captured frame on each pass. This would sometimes have the
undesirable side-effect of missing a chunk of the initial activity that caused the alarm because the
pre-alarm frames would all have to be written to disk and the database before processing the next frame,
leading to some delay between the first and second event frames. Setting this option enables a newer
adaptive algorithm where the analysis daemon attempts to process as many captured frames as possible,
only skipping frames when in danger of the capture daemon overwriting yet to be processed frames. This
skip is variable depending on the size of the ring buffer and the amount of space left in it. Enabling
this option will give you much better coverage of the beginning of alarms whilst biasing out any skipped
frames towards the middle or end of the event. However you should be aware that this will have the effect
of making the analysis daemon run somewhat behind the capture daemon during events and for particularly
fast rates of capture it is possible for the adaptive algorithm to be overwhelmed and not have time to
react to a rapid build up of pending frames and thus for a buffer overrun condition to occur.
MAX_SUSPEND_TIME - ZoneMinder allows monitors to have motion detection to be suspended, for instance
while panning a camera. Ordinarily this relies on the operator resuming motion detection afterwards as
failure to do so can leave a monitor in a permanently suspended state. This setting allows you to set a
maximum time which a camera may be suspended for before it automatically resumes motion detection. This
time can be extended by subsequent suspend indications after the first so continuous camera movement will
also occur while the monitor is suspended.
STRICT_VIDEO_CONFIG - With some video devices errors can be reported in setting the various video
attributes when in fact the operation was successful. Switching this option off will still allow these
errors to be reported but will not cause them to kill the video capture daemon. Note however that doing
this will cause all errors to be ignored including those which are genuine and which may cause the video
capture to not function correctly. Use this option with caution.
SIGNAL_CHECK_POINTS - For locally attached video cameras ZoneMinder can check for signal loss by looking
at a number of random points on each captured image. If all of these points are set to the same fixed
colour then the camera is assumed to have lost signal. When this happens any open events are closed and a
short one frame signal loss event is generated, as is another when the signal returns. This option
defines how many points on each image to check. Note that this is a maximum, any points found to not have
the check colour will abort any further checks so in most cases on a couple of points will actually be
checked. Network and file based cameras are never checked.
V4L_MULTI_BUFFER - Performance when using Video 4 Linux devices is usually best if multiple buffers are
used allowing the next image to be captured while the previous one is being processed. If you have
multiple devices on a card sharing one input that requires switching then this approach can sometimes
cause frames from one source to be mixed up with frames from another. Switching this option off prevents
multi buffering resulting in slower but more stable image capture. This option is ignored for non-local
cameras or if only one input is present on a capture chip. This option addresses a similar problem to the
ZM_CAPTURES_PER_FRAME option and you should normally change the value of only one of the options at a
time. If you have different capture cards that need different values you can ovveride them in each
individual monitor on the source page.
CAPTURES_PER_FRAME - If you are using cameras attached to a video capture card which forces multiple
inputs to share one capture chip, it can sometimes produce images with interlaced frames reversed
resulting in poor image quality and a distinctive comb edge appearance. Increasing this setting allows
you to force additional image captures before one is selected as the captured frame. This allows the
capture hardware to ‘settle down’ and produce better quality images at the price of lesser capture rates.
This option has no effect on (a) network cameras, or (b) where multiple inputs do not share a capture
chip. This option addresses a similar problem to the ZM_V4L_MULTI_BUFFER option and you should normally
change the value of only one of the options at a time. If you have different capture cards that need
different values you can ovveride them in each individual monitor on the source page.
FORCED_ALARM_SCORE - The ‘zmu’ utility can be used to force an alarm on a monitor rather than rely on the
motion detection algorithms. This option determines what score to give these alarms to distinguish them
from regular ones. It must be 255 or less.
BULK_FRAME_INTERVAL - Traditionally ZoneMinder writes an entry into the Frames database table for each
frame that is captured and saved. This works well in motion detection scenarios but when in a DVR
situation (‘Record’ or ‘Mocord’ mode) this results in a huge number of frame writes and a lot of database
and disk bandwidth for very little additional information. Setting this to a non-zero value will enabled
ZoneMinder to group these non-alarm frames into one ‘bulk’ frame entry which saves a lot of bandwidth and
space. The only disadvantage of this is that timing information for individual frames is lost but in
constant frame rate situations this is usually not significant. This setting is ignored in Modect mode
and individual frames are still written if an alarm occurs in Mocord mode also.
EVENT_CLOSE_MODE - When a monitor is running in a continuous recording mode (Record or Mocord) events are
usually closed after a fixed period of time (the section length). However in Mocord mode it is possible
that motion detection may occur near the end of a section. This option controls what happens when an
alarm occurs in Mocord mode. The ‘time’ setting means that the event will be closed at the end of the
section regardless of alarm activity. The ‘idle’ setting means that the event will be closed at the end
of the section if there is no alarm activity occurring at the time otherwise it will be closed once the
alarm is over meaning the event may end up being longer than the normal section length. The ‘alarm’
setting means that if an alarm occurs during the event, the event will be closed once the alarm is over
regardless of when this occurs. This has the effect of limiting the number of alarms to one per event and
the events will be shorter than the section length if an alarm has occurred.
CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES - By default during an alarm ZoneMinder records both the raw captured image and
one that has been analysed and had areas where motion was detected outlined. This can be very useful
during zone configuration or in analysing why events occurred. However it also incurs some overhead and
in a stable system may no longer be necessary. This parameter allows you to switch the generation of
these images off.
WEIGHTED_ALARM_CENTRES - ZoneMinder will always calculate the centre point of an alarm in a zone to give
some indication of where on the screen it is. This can be used by the experimental motion tracking
feature or your own custom extensions. In the alarmed or filtered pixels mode this is a simple midpoint
between the extents of the detected pxiesl. However in the blob method this can instead be calculated
using weighted pixel locations to give more accurate positioning for irregularly shaped blobs. This
method, while more precise is also slower and so is turned off by default.
EVENT_IMAGE_DIGITS - As event images are captured they are stored to the filesystem with a numerical
index. By default this index has three digits so the numbers start 001, 002 etc. This works works for
most scenarios as events with more than 999 frames are rarely captured. However if you have extremely
long events and use external applications then you may wish to increase this to ensure correct sorting of
images in listings etc. Warning, increasing this value on a live system may render existing events
unviewable as the event will have been saved with the previous scheme. Decreasing this value should have
no ill effects.
DEFAULT_ASPECT_RATIO - When specifying the dimensions of monitors you can click a checkbox to ensure that
the width stays in the correct ratio to the height, or vice versa. This setting allows you to indicate
what the ratio of these settings should be. This should be specified in the format <width value>:<height
value> and the default of 4:3 normally be acceptable but 11:9 is another common setting. If the checkbox
is not clicked when specifying monitor dimensions this setting has no effect.
USER_SELF_EDIT - Ordinarily only users with system edit privilege are able to change users details.
Switching this option on allows ordinary users to change their passwords and their language settings
Options - Servers
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Servers tab is used for setting up multiple ZoneMinder servers sharing the same database and using a
shared file share for all event data. To add a new server use the Add Server button. All that is required
is a Name for the Server and Hostname.
To delete a server mark that server and click the Delete button.
Please note that all servers must have a functional web UI as the live view must come from the monitor’s
host server.
On each server, you will have to edit /etc/zm/zm.conf and set either ZM_SERVER_NAME=
Options - Paths
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ZM_DIR_EVENTS - This is the path to the events directory where all the event images and other
miscellaneous files are stored. CAUTION: The directory you specify here cannot be outside the web root.
This is a common mistake. Most users should never change this value. If you intend to record events to a
second disk or network share, then you should mount the drive or share directly to the ZoneMinder events
folder or follow the instructions in the ZoneMinder Wiki titled Using a dedicated Hard Drive.
USE_DEEP_STORAGE - Traditionally ZoneMinder stores all events for a monitor in one directory for that
monitor. This is simple and efficient except when you have very large amounts of events. Some filesystems
are unable to store more than 32k files in one directory and even without this limitation, large numbers
of files in a directory can slow creation and deletion of files. This option allows you to select an
alternate method of storing events by year/month/day/hour/min/second which has the effect of separating
events out into more directories, resulting in less per directory, and also making it easier to manually
navigate to any events that may have happened at a particular time or date.
DIR_IMAGES - ZoneMinder generates a myriad of images, mostly of which are associated with events. For
those that aren’t this is where they go. CAUTION: The directory you specify here cannot be outside the
web root. This is a common mistake. Most users should never change this value. If you intend to save
images to a second disk or network share, then you should mount the drive or share directly to the
ZoneMinder images folder or follow the instructions in the ZoneMinder Wiki titled Using a dedicated Hard
Drive.
DIR_SOUNDS - ZoneMinder can optionally play a sound file when an alarm is detected. This indicates where
to look for this file. CAUTION: The directory you specify here cannot be outside the web root. Most users
should never change this value.
PATH_ZMS - The ZoneMinder streaming server is required to send streamed images to your browser. It will
be installed into the cgi-bin path given at configuration time. This option determines what the web path
to the server is rather than the local path on your machine. Ordinarily the streaming server runs in
parser-header mode however if you experience problems with streaming you can change this to
non-parsed-header (nph) mode by changing ‘zms’ to ‘nph-zms’.
PATH_MAP - ZoneMinder has historically used IPC shared memory for shared data between processes. This has
it’s advantages and limitations. This version of ZoneMinder can use an alternate method, mapped memory,
instead with can be enabled with the –enable–mmap directive to configure. This requires less system
configuration and is generally more flexible. However it requires each shared data segment to map onto a
filesystem file. This option indicates where those mapped files go. You should ensure that this location
has sufficient space for these files and for the best performance it should be a tmpfs file system or
ramdisk otherwise disk access may render this method slower than the regular shared memory one.
PATH_SOCKS - ZoneMinder generally uses Unix domain sockets where possible. This reduces the need for port
assignments and prevents external applications from possibly compromising the daemons. However each Unix
socket requires a .sock file to be created. This option indicates where those socket files go.
PATH_LOGS - There are various daemons that are used by ZoneMinder to perform various tasks. Most generate
helpful log files and this is where they go. They can be deleted if not required for debugging.
PATH_SWAP - Buffered playback requires temporary swap images to be stored for each instance of the
streaming daemons. This option determines where these images will be stored. The images will actually be
stored in sub directories beneath this location and will be automatically cleaned up after a period of
time.
Options - Web
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WEB_TITLE_PREFIX - If you have more than one installation of ZoneMinder it can be helpful to display
different titles for each one. Changing this option allows you to customise the window titles to include
further information to aid identification.
WEB_RESIZE_CONSOLE - Traditionally the main ZoneMinder web console window has resized itself to shrink to
a size small enough to list only the monitors that are actually present. This is intended to make the
window more unobtrusize but may not be to everyones tastes, especially if opened in a tab in browsers
which support this kind if layout. Switch this option off to have the console window size left to the
users preference
WEB_POPUP_ON_ALARM - When viewing a live monitor stream you can specify whether you want the window to
pop to the front if an alarm occurs when the window is minimised or behind another window. This is most
useful if your monitors are over doors for example when they can pop up if someone comes to the doorway.
WEB_SOUND_ON_ALARM - When viewing a live monitor stream you can specify whether you want the window to
play a sound to alert you if an alarm occurs.
WEB_ALARM_SOUND - You can specify a sound file to play if an alarm occurs whilst you are watching a live
monitor stream. So long as your browser understands the format it does not need to be any particular
type. This file should be placed in the sounds directory defined earlier.
WEB_COMPACT_MONTAGE - The montage view shows the output of all of your active monitors in one window.
This include a small menu and status information for each one. This can increase the web traffic and make
the window larger than may be desired. Setting this option on removes all this extraneous information and
just displays the images.
WEB_EVENT_SORT_FIELD - Events in lists can be initially ordered in any way you want. This option controls
what field is used to sort them. You can modify this ordering from filters or by clicking on headings in
the lists themselves. Bear in mind however that the ‘Prev’ and ‘Next’ links, when scrolling through
events, relate to the ordering in the lists and so not always to time based ordering.
WEB_EVENT_SORT_ORDER - Events in lists can be initially ordered in any way you want. This option controls
what order (ascending or descending) is used to sort them. You can modify this ordering from filters or
by clicking on headings in the lists themselves. Bear in mind however that the ‘Prev’ and ‘Next’ links,
when scrolling through events, relate to the ordering in the lists and so not always to time based
ordering.
WEB_EVENTS_PER_PAGE - In the event list view you can either list all events or just a page at a time.
This option controls how many events are listed per page in paged mode and how often to repeat the column
headers in non-paged mode.
WEB_LIST_THUMBS - Ordinarily the event lists just display text details of the events to save space and
time. By switching this option on you can also display small thumbnails to help you identify events of
interest. The size of these thumbnails is controlled by the following two options.
WEB_LIST_THUMB_WIDTH - This options controls the width of the thumbnail images that appear in the event
lists. It should be fairly small to fit in with the rest of the table. If you prefer you can specify a
height instead in the next option but you should only use one of the width or height and the other option
should be set to zero. If both width and height are specified then width will be used and height ignored.
WEB_LIST_THUMB_HEIGHT - This options controls the height of the thumbnail images that appear in the event
lists. It should be fairly small to fit in with the rest of the table. If you prefer you can specify a
width instead in the previous option but you should only use one of the width or height and the other
option should be set to zero. If both width and height are specified then width will be used and height
ignored.
WEB_USE_OBJECT_TAGS - There are two methods of including media content in web pages. The most common way
is use the EMBED tag which is able to give some indication of the type of content. However this is not a
standard part of HTML. The official method is to use OBJECT tags which are able to give more information
allowing the correct media viewers etc to be loaded. However these are less widely supported and content
may be specifically tailored to a particular platform or player. This option controls whether media
content is enclosed in EMBED tags only or whether, where appropriate, it is additionally wrapped in
OBJECT tags. Currently OBJECT tags are only used in a limited number of circumstances but they may become
more widespread in the future. It is suggested that you leave this option on unless you encounter
problems playing some content.
Options - Images
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OPT_FFMPEG - ZoneMinder can optionally encode a series of video images into an MPEG encoded movie file
for viewing, downloading or storage. This option allows you to specify whether you have the ffmpeg tools
installed. Note that creating MPEG files can be fairly CPU and disk intensive and is not a required
option as events can still be reviewed as video streams without it.
PATH_FFMPEG - This path should point to where ffmpeg has been installed.
FFMPEG_INPUT_OPTIONS - Ffmpeg can take many options on the command line to control the quality of video
produced. This option allows you to specify your own set that apply to the input to ffmpeg (options that
are given before the -i option). Check the ffmpeg documentation for a full list of options which may be
used here.
FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS - Ffmpeg can take many options on the command line to control the quality of video
produced. This option allows you to specify your own set that apply to the output from ffmpeg (options
that are given after the -i option). Check the ffmpeg documentation for a full list of options which may
be used here. The most common one will often be to force an output frame rate supported by the video
encoder.
FFMPEG_FORMATS - Ffmpeg can generate video in many different formats. This option allows you to list the
ones you want to be able to select. As new formats are supported by ffmpeg you can add them here and be
able to use them immediately. Adding a ‘*’ after a format indicates that this will be the default format
used for web video, adding ‘**’ defines the default format for phone video.
FFMPEG_OPEN_TIMEOUT - When Ffmpeg is opening a stream, it can take a long time before failing; certain
circumstances even seem to be able to lock indefinitely. This option allows you to set a maximum time in
seconds to pass before closing the stream and trying to reopen it again.
JPEG_STREAM_QUALITY - When viewing a ‘live’ stream for a monitor ZoneMinder will grab an image from the
buffer and encode it into JPEG format before sending it. This option specifies what image quality should
be used to encode these images. A higher number means better quality but less compression so will take
longer to view over a slow connection. By contrast a low number means quicker to view images but at the
price of lower quality images. This option does not apply when viewing events or still images as these
are usually just read from disk and so will be encoded at the quality specified by the previous options.
MPEG_TIMED_FRAMES - When using streamed MPEG based video, either for live monitor streams or events,
ZoneMinder can send the streams in two ways. If this option is selected then the timestamp for each
frame, taken from it’s capture time, is included in the stream. This means that where the frame rate
varies, for instance around an alarm, the stream will still maintain it’s ‘real’ timing. If this option
is not selected then an approximate frame rate is calculated and that is used to schedule frames instead.
This option should be selected unless you encounter problems with your preferred streaming method.
MPEG_LIVE_FORMAT - When using MPEG mode ZoneMinder can output live video. However what formats are
handled by the browser varies greatly between machines. This option allows you to specify a video format
using a file extension format, so you would just enter the extension of the file type you would like and
the rest is determined from that. The default of ‘asf’ works well under Windows with Windows Media Player
but I’m currently not sure what, if anything, works on a Linux platform. If you find out please let me
know! If this option is left blank then live streams will revert to being in motion jpeg format
MPEG_REPLAY_FORMAT - When using MPEG mode ZoneMinder can replay events in encoded video format. However
what formats are handled by the browser varies greatly between machines. This option allows you to
specify a video format using a file extension format, so you would just enter the extension of the file
type you would like and the rest is determined from that. The default of ‘asf’ works well under Windows
with Windows Media Player and ‘mpg’, or ‘avi’ etc should work under Linux. If you know any more then
please let me know! If this option is left blank then live streams will revert to being in motion jpeg
format
RAND_STREAM - Some browsers can cache the streams used by ZoneMinder. In order to prevent his a harmless
random string can be appended to the url to make each invocation of the stream appear unique.
OPT_CAMBOZOLA - Cambozola is a handy low fat cheese flavoured Java applet that ZoneMinder uses to view
image streams on browsers such as Internet Explorer that don’t natively support this format. If you use
this browser it is highly recommended to install this from http://www.charliemouse.com/code/cambozola/
however if it is not installed still images at a lower refresh rate can still be viewed.
PATH_CAMBOZOLA - Cambozola is a handy low fat cheese flavoured Java applet that ZoneMinder uses to view
image streams on browsers such as Internet Explorer that don’t natively support this format. If you use
this browser it is highly recommended to install this from http://www.charliemouse.com/code/cambozola/
however if it is not installed still images at a lower refresh rate can still be viewed. Leave this as
‘cambozola.jar’ if cambozola is installed in the same directory as the ZoneMinder web client files.
RELOAD_CAMBOZOLA - Cambozola allows for the viewing of streaming MJPEG however it caches the entire
stream into cache space on the computer, setting this to a number > 0 will cause it to automatically
reload after that many seconds to avoid filling up a hard drive.
OPT_FFMPEG - ZoneMinder can optionally encode a series of video images into an MPEG encoded movie file
for viewing, downloading or storage. This option allows you to specify whether you have the ffmpeg tools
installed. Note that creating MPEG files can be fairly CPU and disk intensive and is not a required
option as events can still be reviewed as video streams without it.
PATH_FFMPEG - This path should point to where ffmpeg has been installed.
FFMPEG_INPUT_OPTIONS - Ffmpeg can take many options on the command line to control the quality of video
produced. This option allows you to specify your own set that apply to the input to ffmpeg (options that
are given before the -i option). Check the ffmpeg documentation for a full list of options which may be
used here.
FFMPEG_OUTPUT_OPTIONS - Ffmpeg can take many options on the command line to control the quality of video
produced. This option allows you to specify your own set that apply to the output from ffmpeg (options
that are given after the -i option). Check the ffmpeg documentation for a full list of options which may
be used here. The most common one will often be to force an output frame rate supported by the video
encoder.
FFMPEG_FORMATS - Ffmpeg can generate video in many different formats. This option allows you to list the
ones you want to be able to select. As new formats are supported by ffmpeg you can add them here and be
able to use them immediately. Adding a ‘*’ after a format indicates that this will be the default format
used for web video, adding ‘**’ defines the default format for phone video.
FFMPEG_OPEN_TIMEOUT - When Ffmpeg is opening a stream, it can take a long time before failing; certain
circumstances even seem to be able to lock indefinitely. This option allows you to set a maximum time in
seconds to pass before closing the stream and trying to reopen it again.
Options - Logging
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LOG_LEVEL_SYSLOG - ZoneMinder logging is now more more integrated between components and allows you to
specify the destination for logging output and the individual levels for each. This option lets you
control the level of logging output that goes to the system log. ZoneMinder binaries have always logged
to the system log but now scripts and web logging is also included. To preserve the previous behaviour
you should ensure this value is set to Info or Warning. This option controls the maximum level of logging
that will be written, so Info includes Warnings and Errors etc. To disable entirely, set this option to
None. You should use caution when setting this option to Debug as it can affect severely affect system
performance. If you want debug you will also need to set a level and component below
LOG_LEVEL_FILE - ZoneMinder logging is now more more integrated between components and allows you to
specify the destination for logging output and the individual levels for each. This option lets you
control the level of logging output that goes to individual log files written by specific components.
This is how logging worked previously and although useful for tracking down issues in specific components
it also resulted in many disparate log files. To preserve this behaviour you should ensure this value is
set to Info or Warning. This option controls the maximum level of logging that will be written, so Info
includes Warnings and Errors etc. To disable entirely, set this option to None. You should use caution
when setting this option to Debug as it can affect severely affect system performance though file output
has less impact than the other options. If you want debug you will also need to set a level and component
below
LOG_LEVEL_WEBLOG - ZoneMinder logging is now more more integrated between components and allows you to
specify the destination for logging output and the individual levels for each. This option lets you
control the level of logging output from the web interface that goes to the httpd error log. Note that
only web logging from PHP and JavaScript files is included and so this option is really only useful for
investigating specific issues with those components. This option controls the maximum level of logging
that will be written, so Info includes Warnings and Errors etc. To disable entirely, set this option to
None. You should use caution when setting this option to Debug as it can affect severely affect system
performance. If you want debug you will also need to set a level and component below
LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE - ZoneMinder logging is now more more integrated between components and allows you to
specify the destination for logging output and the individual levels for each. This option lets you
control the level of logging output that is written to the database. This is a new option which can make
viewing logging output easier and more intuitive and also makes it easier to get an overall impression of
how the system is performing. If you have a large or very busy system then it is possible that use of
this option may slow your system down if the table becomes very large. Ensure you use the
LOG_DATABASE_LIMIT option to keep the table to a manageable size. This option controls the maximum level
of logging that will be written, so Info includes Warnings and Errors etc. To disable entirely, set this
option to None. You should use caution when setting this option to Debug as it can affect severely affect
system performance. If you want debug you will also need to set a level and component below
LOG_DATABASE_LIMIT - If you are using database logging then it is possible to quickly build up a large
number of entries in the Logs table. This option allows you to specify how many of these entries are
kept. If you set this option to a number greater than zero then that number is used to determine the
maximum number of rows, less than or equal to zero indicates no limit and is not recommended. You can
also set this value to time values such as ‘<n> day’ which will limit the log entries to those newer than
that time. You can specify ‘hour’, ‘day’, ‘week’, ‘month’ and ‘year’, note that the values should be
singular (no ‘s’ at the end). The Logs table is pruned periodically so it is possible for more than the
expected number of rows to be present briefly in the meantime.
LOG_DEBUG” - ZoneMinder components usually support debug logging available to help with diagnosing
problems. Binary components have several levels of debug whereas more other components have only one.
Normally this is disabled to minimise performance penalties and avoid filling logs too quickly. This
option lets you switch on other options that allow you to configure additional debug information to be
output. Components will pick up this instruction when they are restarted.
LOG_DEBUG_TARGET - There are three scopes of debug available. Leaving this option blank means that all
components will use extra debug (not recommended). Setting this option to ‘_<component>’, e.g. _zmc, will
limit extra debug to that component only. Setting this option to ‘_<component>_<identity>’, e.g.
‘_zmc_m1’ will limit extra debug to that instance of the component only. This is ordinarily what you
probably want to do. To debug scripts use their names without the .pl extension, e.g. ‘_zmvideo’ and to
debug issues with the web interface use ‘_web’. You can specify multiple targets by separating them with
‘|’ characters.
LOG_DEBUG_LEVEL - There are 9 levels of debug available, with higher numbers being more debug and level 0
being no debug. However not all levels are used by all components. Also if there is debug at a high level
it is usually likely to be output at such a volume that it may obstruct normal operation. For this reason
you should set the level carefully and cautiously until the degree of debug you wish to see is present.
Scripts and the web interface only have one level so this is an on/off type option for them.
LOG_DEBUG_FILE - This option allows you to specify a different target for debug output. All components
have a default log file which will norally be in /tmp or /var/log and this is where debug will be written
to if this value is empty. Adding a path here will temporarily redirect debug, and other logging output,
to this file. This option is a simple filename and you are debugging several components then they will
all try and write to the same file with undesirable consequences. Appending a ‘+’ to the filename will
cause the file to be created with a ‘.<pid>’ suffix containing your process id. In this way debug from
each run of a component is kept separate. This is the recommended setting as it will also prevent
subsequent runs from overwriting the same log. You should ensure that permissions are set up to allow
writing to the file and directory specified here.
LOG_CHECK_PERIOD - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine the
number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to indicate what period of historical events are used in this calculation. This value
is expressed in seconds and is ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
LOG_ALERT_WAR_COUNT - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine
the number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to specify how many warnings must have occurred within the defined time period to
generate an overall system alert state. A value of zero means warnings are not considered. This value is
ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
LOG_ALERT_ERR_COUNT - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine
the number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to specify how many errors must have occurred within the defined time period to
generate an overall system alert state. A value of zero means errors are not considered. This value is
ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
LOG_ALERT_FAT_COUNT - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine
the number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to specify how many fatal errors (including panics) must have occurred within the
defined time period to generate an overall system alert state. A value of zero means fatal errors are not
considered. This value is ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
LOG_ALARM_WAR_COUNT - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine
the number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to specify how many warnings must have occurred within the defined time period to
generate an overall system alarm state. A value of zero means warnings are not considered. This value is
ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
LOG_ALARM_ERR_COUNT - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine
the number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to specify how many errors must have occurred within the defined time period to
generate an overall system alarm state. A value of zero means errors are not considered. This value is
ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
LOG_ALARM_FAT_COUNT - When ZoneMinder is logging events to the database it can retrospectively examine
the number of warnings and errors that have occurred to calculate an overall state of system health. This
option allows you to specify how many fatal errors (including panics) must have occurred within the
defined time period to generate an overall system alarm state. A value of zero means fatal errors are not
considered. This value is ignored if LOG_LEVEL_DATABASE is set to None.
RECORD_EVENT_STATS - This version of ZoneMinder records detailed information about events in the Stats
table. This can help in profiling what the optimum settings are for Zones though this is tricky at
present. However in future releases this will be done more easily and intuitively, especially with a
large sample of events. The default option of ‘yes’ allows this information to be collected now in
readiness for this but if you are concerned about performance you can switch this off in which case no
Stats information will be saved.
RECORD_DIAG_IMAGES - In addition to recording event statistics you can also record the intermediate
diagnostic images that display the results of the various checks and processing that occur when trying to
determine if an alarm event has taken place. There are several of these images generated for each frame
and zone for each alarm or alert frame so this can have a massive impact on performance. Only switch this
setting on for debug or analysis purposes and remember to switch it off again once no longer required.
DUMP_CORES - When an unrecoverable error occurs in a ZoneMinder binary process is has traditionally been
trapped and the details written to logs to aid in remote analysis. However in some cases it is easier to
diagnose the error if a core file, which is a memory dump of the process at the time of the error, is
created. This can be interactively analysed in the debugger and may reveal more or better information
than that available from the logs. This option is recommended for advanced users only otherwise leave at
the default. Note using this option to trigger core files will mean that there will be no indication in
the binary logs that a process has died, they will just stop, however the zmdc log will still contain an
entry. Also note that you may have to explicitly enable core file creation on your system via the ‘ulimit
-c’ command or other means otherwise no file will be created regardless of the value of this option.
Options - Network
[image]
HTTP_VERSION - ZoneMinder can communicate with network cameras using either of the HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/1.0
standard. A server will normally fall back to the version it supports with no problem so this should
usually by left at the default. However it can be changed to HTTP/1.0 if necessary to resolve particular
issues.
HTTP_UA - When ZoneMinder communicates with remote cameras it will identify itself using this string and
it’s version number. This is normally sufficient, however if a particular cameras expects only to
communicate with certain browsers then this can be changed to a different string identifying ZoneMinder
as Internet Explorer or Netscape etc.
HTTP_TIMEOUT - When retrieving remote images ZoneMinder will wait for this length of time before deciding
that an image is not going to arrive and taking steps to retry. This timeout is in milliseconds (1000 per
second) and will apply to each part of an image if it is not sent in one whole chunk.
MIN_RTP_PORT - When ZoneMinder communicates with MPEG4 capable cameras using RTP with the unicast method
it must open ports for the camera to connect back to for control and streaming purposes. This setting
specifies the minimum port number that ZoneMinder will use. Ordinarily two adjacent ports are used for
each camera, one for control packets and one for data packets. This port should be set to an even number,
you may also need to open up a hole in your firewall to allow cameras to connect back if you wish to use
unicasting.
MAX_RTP_PORT - When ZoneMinder communicates with MPEG4 capable cameras using RTP with the unicast method
it must open ports for the camera to connect back to for control and streaming purposes. This setting
specifies the maximum port number that ZoneMinder will use. Ordinarily two adjacent ports are used for
each camera, one for control packets and one for data packets. This port should be set to an even number,
you may also need to open up a hole in your firewall to allow cameras to connect back if you wish to use
unicasting. You should also ensure that you have opened up at least two ports for each monitor that will
be connecting to unicasting network cameras.
Options - Email
[image]
OPT_EMAIL - In ZoneMinder you can create event filters that specify whether events that match certain
criteria should have their details emailed to you at a designated email address. This will allow you to
be notified of events as soon as they occur and also to quickly view the events directly. This option
specifies whether this functionality should be available. The email created with this option can be any
size and is intended to be sent to a regular email reader rather than a mobile device.
EMAIL_ADDRESS - This option is used to define the email address that any events that match the
appropriate filters will be sent to.
EMAIL_SUBJECT - This option is used to define the subject of the email that is sent for any events that
match the appropriate filters.
EMAIL_BODY - This option is used to define the content of the email that is sent for any events that
match the appropriate filters.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
Token Description
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EI% Id of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EN% Name of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EC% Cause of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%ED% Event description
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%ET% Time of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EL% Length of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EF% Number of frames in the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EFA% Number of alarm frames in the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EST% Total score of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%ESA% Average score of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%ESM% Maximum score of the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EP% Path to the event
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EPS% Path to the event stream
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EPI% Path to the event images
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EPI1% Path to the first alarmed event image
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EPIM% Path to the (first) event image with
the highest score
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EI1% Attach first alarmed event image
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EIM% Attach (first) event image with the
highest score
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%EV% Attach event mpeg video
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MN% Name of the monitor
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MET% Total number of events for the
monitor
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MEH% Number of events for the monitor in
the last hour
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MED% Number of events for the monitor in
the last day
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MEW% Number of events for the monitor in
the last week
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MEM% Number of events for the monitor in
the last month
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MEA% Number of archived events for the
monitor
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MP% Path to the monitor window
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MPS% Path to the monitor stream
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%MPI% Path to the monitor recent image
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%FN% Name of the current filter that
matched
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%FP% Path to the current filter that
matched
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
%ZP% Path to your ZoneMinder console
┌────────┬───────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ │
--
API
This document will provide an overview of ZoneMinder’s API. This is work in progress.
Overview
In an effort to further ‘open up’ ZoneMinder, an API was needed. This will allow quick integration with
and development of ZoneMinder.
The API is built in CakePHP and lives under the /api directory. It provides a RESTful service and
supports CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) functions for Monitors, Events, Frames, Zones and
Config.
Streaming Interface
Developers working on their application often ask if there is an “API” to receive live streams, or
recorded event streams. It is possible to stream both live and recorded streams. This isn’t strictly an
“API” per-se (that is, it is not integrated into the Cake PHP based API layer discussed here) and also
why we’ve used the term “Interface” instead of an “API”.
Live Streams
What you need to know is that if you want to display “live streams”, ZoneMinder sends you streaming JPEG
images (MJPEG) which can easily be rendered in a browser using an img src tag.
For example:
<img src="https://yourserver/zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms?scale=50&width=640p&height=480px&mode=jpeg&maxfps=5&buffer=1000&&monitor=1&auth=b54a589e09f330498f4ae2203&connkey=36139" />
will display a live feed from monitor id 1, scaled down by 50% in quality and resized to 640x480px.
• This assumes /zm/cgi-bin is your CGI_BIN path. Change it to what is correct in your system
• The “auth” token you see above is required if you use ZoneMinder authentication. To understand how to
get the auth token, please read the “Login, Logout & API security” section below.
• The “connkey” parameter is essentially a random number which uniquely identifies a stream. If you don’t
specify a connkey, ZM will generate its own. It is recommended to generate a connkey because you can
then use it to “control” the stream (pause/resume etc.)
• Instead of dealing with the “auth” token, you can also use &user=username&pass=password where
“username” and “password” are your ZoneMinder username and password respectively. Note that this is not
recommended because you are transmitting them in a URL and even if you use HTTPS, they may show up in
web server logs.
PTZ on live streams
PTZ commands are pretty cryptic in ZoneMinder. This is not meant to be an exhaustive guide, but just
something to whet your appetite:
Lets assume you have a monitor, with ID=6. Let’s further assume you want to pan it left.
You’d need to send a: POST command to https://yourserver/zm/index.php with the following data payload in
the command (NOT in the URL)
view=request&request=control&id=6&control=moveConLeft&xge=30&yge=30
Obviously, if you are using authentication, you need to be logged in for this to work.
Like I said, at this stage, this is only meant to get you started. Explore the ZoneMinder code and use
“Inspect source” as you use PTZ commands in the ZoneMinder source code. control_functions.php is a great
place to start.
Pre-recorded (past event) streams
Similar to live playback, if you have chosen to store events in JPEG mode, you can play it back using:
<img src="https://yourserver/zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms?mode=jpeg&frame=1&replay=none&source=event&event=293820&connkey=77493&auth=b54a58f5f4ae2203" />
• This assumes /zm/cgi-bin is your CGI_BIN path. Change it to what is correct in your system
• This will playback event 293820, starting from frame 1 as an MJPEG stream
• Like before, you can add more parameters like scale etc.
• auth and connkey have the same meaning as before, and yes, you can replace auth by
&user=usename&pass=password as before and the same security concerns cited above apply.
If instead, you have chosen to use the MP4 (Video) storage mode for events, you can directly play back
the saved video file:
<video src="https://yourserver/zm/index.php?view=view_video&eid=294690&auth=33f3d558af84cf08" type="video/mp4"></video>
• This will play back the video recording for event 294690
What other parameters are supported?
The best way to answer this question is to play with ZoneMinder console. Open a browser, play back live
or recorded feed, and do an “Inspect Source” to see what parameters are generated. Change and observe.
Enabling API
A default ZoneMinder installs with APIs enabled. You can explictly enable/disable the APIs via the
Options->System menu by enabling/disabling OPT_USE_API. Note that if you intend to use APIs with 3rd
party apps, such as zmNinja or others that use APIs, you should also enable AUTH_HASH_LOGINS.
Login, Logout & API Security
The APIs tie into ZoneMinder’s existing security model. This means if you have OPT_AUTH enabled, you need
to log into ZoneMinder using the same browser you plan to use the APIs from. If you are developing an app
that relies on the API, you need to do a POST login from the app into ZoneMinder before you can access
the API.
Then, you need to re-use the authentication information of the login (returned as cookie states) with
subsequent APIs for the authentication information to flow through to the APIs.
This means if you plan to use cuRL to experiment with these APIs, you first need to login:
Login process for ZoneMinder v1.32.0 and above
curl -XPOST -d "user=XXXX&pass=YYYY" -c cookies.txt http://yourzmip/zm/api/host/login.json
Staring ZM 1.32.0, you also have a logout API that basically clears your session. It looks like this:
curl -b cookies.txt http://yourzmip/zm/api/host/logout.json
Login process for older versions of ZoneMinder
curl -d "username=XXXX&password=YYYY&action=login&view=console" -c cookies.txt http://yourzmip/zm/index.php
The equivalent logout process for older versions of ZoneMinder is:
curl -XPOST -d "username=XXXX&password=YYYY&action=logout&view=console" -b cookies.txt http://yourzmip/zm/index.php
replacing XXXX and YYYY with your username and password, respectively.
Please make sure you do this in a directory where you have write permissions, otherwise cookies.txt will
not be created and the command will silently fail.
What the “-c cookies.txt” does is store a cookie state reflecting that you have logged into ZM. You now
need to apply that cookie state to all subsequent APIs. You do that by using a ‘-b cookies.txt’ to
subsequent APIs if you are using CuRL like so:
curl -b cookies.txt http://yourzmip/zm/api/monitors.json
This would return a list of monitors and pass on the authentication information to the ZM API layer.
A deeper dive into the login process
As you might have seen above, there are two ways to login, one that uses the login.json API and the other
that logs in using the ZM portal. If you are running ZoneMinder 1.32.0 and above, it is strongly
recommended you use the login.json approach. The “old” approach will still work but is not as powerful as
the API based login. Here are the reasons why:
• The “old” approach basically uses the same login webpage (index.php) that a user would log into when
viewing the ZM console. This is not really using an API and more importantly, if you have additional
components like reCAPTCHA enabled, this will not work. Using the API approach is much cleaner and
will work irrespective of reCAPTCHA
• The new login API returns important information that you can use to stream videos as well, right
after login. Consider for example, a typical response to the login API (/login.json):
{
"credentials": "auth=f5b9cf48693fe8552503c8ABCD5",
"append_password": 0,
"version": "1.31.44",
"apiversion": "1.0"
}
In this example I have OPT_AUTH enabled in ZoneMinder and it returns my credential key. You can then use
this key to stream images like so:
<img src="https://server/zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms?monitor=1&auth=<authval>" />
Where authval is the credentials returned to start streaming videos.
The append_password field will contain 1 when it is necessary for you to append your ZM password. This is
the case when you set AUTH_RELAY in ZM options to “plain”, for example. In that case, the credentials
field may contain something like &user=admin&pass= and you have to add your password to that string.
NOTE:
It is recommended you invoke the login API once every 60 minutes to make sure the session stays alive.
The same is true if you use the old login method too.
Examples (please read security notice above)
Please remember, if you are using authentication, please add a -b cookies.txt to each of the commands
below if you are using CuRL. If you are not using CuRL and writing your own app, you need to make sure
you pass on cookies to subsequent requests in your app.
(In all examples, replace ‘server’ with IP or hostname & port where ZoneMinder is running)
API Version
To retrieve the API version:
curl http://server/zm/api/host/getVersion.json
Return a list of all monitors
curl http://server/zm/api/monitors.json
It is worthwhile to note that starting ZM 1.32.3 and beyond, this API also returns a Monitor_Status
object per monitor. It looks like this:
"Monitor_Status": {
"MonitorId": "2",
"Status": "Connected",
"CaptureFPS": "1.67",
"AnalysisFPS": "1.67",
"CaptureBandwidth": "52095"
}
If you don’t see this in your API, you are running an older version of ZM. This gives you a very
convenient way to check monitor status without calling the daemonCheck API described later.
Retrieve monitor 1
curl http://server/zm/api/monitors/1.json
Change State of Monitor 1
This API changes monitor 1 to Modect and Enabled
curl -XPOST http://server/zm/api/monitors/1.json -d "Monitor[Function]=Modect&Monitor[Enabled]=1"
Get Daemon Status of Monitor 1
curl http://server/zm/api/monitors/daemonStatus/id:1/daemon:zmc.json
Add a monitor
This command will add a new http monitor.
curl -XPOST http://server/zm/api/monitors.json -d "Monitor[Name]=Cliff-Burton\
&Monitor[Function]=Modect\
&Monitor[Protocol]=http\
&Monitor[Method]=simple\
&Monitor[Host]=usr:pass@192.168.11.20\
&Monitor[Port]=80\
&Monitor[Path]=/mjpg/video.mjpg\
&Monitor[Width]=704\
&Monitor[Height]=480\
&Monitor[Colours]=4"
Edit monitor 1
This command will change the ‘Name’ field of Monitor 1 to ‘test1’
curl -XPUT http://server/zm/api/monitors/1.json -d "Monitor[Name]=test1"
Delete monitor 1
This command will delete Monitor 1, but will _not_ delete any Events which depend on it.
curl -XDELETE http://server/zm/api/monitors/1.json
Arm/Disarm monitors
This command will force an alarm on Monitor 1:
curl http://server/zm/api/monitors/alarm/id:1/command:on.json
This command will disable the alarm on Monitor 1:
curl http://server/zm/api/monitors/alarm/id:1/command:off.json
This command will report the status of the alarm Monitor 1:
curl http://server/zm/api/monitors/alarm/id:1/command:status.json
Return a list of all events
http://server/zm/api/events.json
Note that events list can be quite large and this API (as with all other APIs in ZM) uses pagination.
Each page returns a specific set of entries. By default this is 25 and ties into WEB_EVENTS_PER_PAGE in
the ZM options menu.
So the logic to iterate through all events should be something like this (pseudocode): (unfortunately
there is no way to get pageCount without getting the first page)
data = http://server/zm/api/events.json?page=1 # this returns the first page
# The json object returned now has a property called data.pagination.pageCount
count = data.pagination.pageCount;
for (i=1, i<count, i++)
{
data = http://server/zm/api/events.json?page=i;
doStuff(data);
}
Retrieve event Id 1000
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/events/1000.json
Edit event 1
This command will change the ‘Name’ field of Event 1 to ‘Seek and Destroy’
curl -XPUT http://server/zm/api/events/1.json -d "Event[Name]=Seek and Destroy"
Delete event 1
This command will delete Event 1, and any Frames which depend on it.
curl -XDELETE http://server/zm/api/events/1.json
Return a list of events for a specific monitor Id =5
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/events/index/MonitorId:5.json
Note that the same pagination logic applies if the list is too long
Return a list of events for a specific monitor within a specific date/time range
http://server/zm/api/events/index/MonitorId:5/StartTime >=:2015-05-15 18:43:56/EndTime <=:2015-05-16 18:43:56.json
To try this in CuRL, you need to URL escape the spaces like so:
curl -XGET "http://server/zm/api/events/index/MonitorId:5/StartTime%20>=:2015-05-15%2018:43:56/EndTime%20<=:2015-05-16%2018:43:56.json"
Return a list of events for all monitors within a specified date/time range
curl -XGET "http://server/zm/api/events/index/StartTime%20>=:2015-05-15%2018:43:56/EndTime%20<=:208:43:56.json"
Return event count based on times and conditions
The API also supports a handy mechanism to return a count of events for a period of time.
This returns number of events per monitor that were recorded in the last one hour
curl "http://server/zm/api/events/consoleEvents/1%20hour.json"
This returns number of events per monitor that were recorded in the last day where there were atleast 10
frames that were alarms”
curl "http://server/zm/api/events/consoleEvents/1%20day.json/AlarmFrames >=: 10.json"
Configuration Apis
The APIs allow you to access all the configuration parameters of ZM that you typically set inside the web
console. This returns the full list of configuration parameters:
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/configs.json
Each configuration parameter has an Id, Name, Value and other fields. Chances are you are likely only
going to focus on these 3.
The edit function of the Configs API is a little quirky at the moment. Its format deviates from the usual
edit flow of other APIs. This will be fixed, eventually. For now, to change the “Value” of
ZM_X10_HOUSE_CODE from A to B:
curl -XPUT http://server/zm/api/configs/edit/ZM_X10_HOUSE_CODE.json -d "Config[Value]=B"
To validate changes have been made:
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/configs/view/ZM_X10_HOUSE_CODE.json
Run State Apis
ZM API can be used to start/stop/restart/list states of ZM as well Examples:
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/states.json # returns list of run states
curl -XPOST http://server/zm/api/states/change/restart.json #restarts ZM
curl -XPOST http://server/zm/api/states/change/stop.json #Stops ZM
curl -XPOST http://server/zm/api/states/change/start.json #Starts ZM
Create a Zone
curl -XPOST http://server/zm/api/zones.json -d "Zone[Name]=Jason-Newsted\
&Zone[MonitorId]=3\
&Zone[Type]=Active\
&Zone[Units]=Percent\
&Zone[NumCoords]=4\
&Zone[Coords]=0,0 639,0 639,479 0,479\
&Zone[AlarmRGB]=16711680\
&Zone[CheckMethod]=Blobs\
&Zone[MinPixelThreshold]=25\
&Zone[MaxPixelThreshold]=\
&Zone[MinAlarmPixels]=9216\
&Zone[MaxAlarmPixels]=\
&Zone[FilterX]=3\
&Zone[FilterY]=3\
&Zone[MinFilterPixels]=9216\
&Zone[MaxFilterPixels]=230400\
&Zone[MinBlobPixels]=6144\
&Zone[MaxBlobPixels]=\
&Zone[MinBlobs]=1\
&Zone[MaxBlobs]=\
&Zone[OverloadFrames]=0"
PTZ Control Meta-Data APIs
PTZ controls associated with a monitor are stored in the Controls table and not the Monitors table inside
ZM. What that means is when you get the details of a Monitor, you will only know if it is controllable
(isControllable:true) and the control ID. To be able to retrieve PTZ information related to that Control
ID, you need to use the controls API
Note that these APIs only retrieve control data related to PTZ. They don’t actually move the camera. See
the “PTZ on live streams” section to move the camera.
This returns all the control definitions:
curl http://server/zm/api/controls.json
This returns control definitions for a specific control ID=5
curl http://server/zm/api/controls/5.json
Host APIs
ZM APIs have various APIs that help you in determining host (aka ZM) daemon status, load etc. Some
examples:
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/host/getLoad.json # returns current load of ZM
# Note that ZM 1.32.3 onwards has the same information in Monitors.json which is more reliable and works for multi-server too.
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/host/daemonCheck.json # 1 = ZM running 0=not running
# The API below uses "du" to calculate disk space. We no longer recommend you use it if you have many events. Use the Storage APIs instead, described later
curl -XGET http://server/zm/api/host/getDiskPercent.json # returns in GB (not percentage), disk usage per monitor (that is,space taken to store various event related information,images etc. per monitor)
Storage and Server APIs
ZoneMinder introduced many new options that allowed you to configure multiserver/multistorage
configurations. While a part of this was available in previous versions, a lot of rework was done as part
of ZM 1.31 and 1.32. As part of that work, a lot of new and useful APIs were added. Some of these are
part of ZM 1.32 and others will be part of ZM 1.32.3 (of course, if you build from master, you can access
them right away, or wait till a stable release is out.
This returns storage data for my single server install. If you are using multi-storage, you’ll see many
such “Storage” entries, one for each storage defined:
curl http://server/zm/api/storage.json
Returns:
{
"storage": [
{
"Storage": {
"Id": "0",
"Path": "\/var\/cache\/zoneminder\/events",
"Name": "Default",
"Type": "local",
"Url": null,
"DiskSpace": "364705447651",
"Scheme": "Medium",
"ServerId": null,
"DoDelete": true
}
}
]
}
“DiskSpace” is the disk used in bytes. While this doesn’t return disk space data as rich as
/host/getDiskPercent, it is much more efficient.
Similarly,
curl http://server/zm/api/servers.json
Returns:
{
"servers": [
{
"Server": {
"Id": "1",
"Name": "server1",
"Hostname": "server1.mydomain.com",
"State_Id": null,
"Status": "Running",
"CpuLoad": "0.9",
"TotalMem": "6186237952",
"FreeMem": "156102656",
"TotalSwap": "536866816",
"FreeSwap": "525697024",
"zmstats": false,
"zmaudit": false,
"zmtrigger": false
}
}
]
}
This only works if you have a multiserver setup in place. If you don’t it will return an empty array.
Further Reading
As described earlier, treat this document as an “introduction” to the important parts of the API and
streaming interfaces. There are several details that haven’t yet been documented. Till they are, here
are some resources:
• zmNinja, the open source mobile app for ZoneMinder is 100% based on ZM APIs. Explore its source code to
see how things work.
• Launch up ZM console in a browser, and do an “Inspect source”. See how images are being rendered. Go to
the networks tab of the inspect source console and look at network requests that are made when you
pause/play/forward streams.
• If you still can’t find an answer, post your question in the forums (not the github repo).
FAQ
This is the FAQ page. Feel free to contribute any FAQs that you think are missing.
How can I stop ZoneMinder filling up my disk?
Recent versions of ZoneMinder come with a filter you can use for this purpose already included. The
filter is called PurgeWhenFull and to find it, choose one of the event counts from the console page, for
instance events in the last hour, for one of your monitors. Note that this filter is automatically
enabled if you do a fresh install of ZoneMinder including creating a new database. If you already have an
existing database and are upgrading ZoneMinder, it will retain the settings of the filter (which in
earlier releases was disabled by default). So you may want to check if PurgeWhenFull is enabled and if
not, enable it.
To enable it, go to Web Console, click on any of your Events of any of your monitors. This will bring up
an event listing and a filter window.
In the filter window there is a drop down select box labeled ‘Use Filter’, that lets your select a saved
filter. Select ‘PurgeWhenFull’ and it will load that filter.
Make any modifications you might want, such as the percentage full you want it to kick in, or how many
events to delete at a time (it will repeat the filter as many times as needed to clear the space, but
will only delete this many events each time to get there).
Then click on ‘Save’ which will bring up a new window. Make sure the ‘Automatically delete’ box is
checked and press save to save your filter. This will then run in the background to keep your disk within
those limits.
After you’ve done that, you changes will automatically be loaded into zmfilter within a few minutes.
Check the zmfilter.log file to make sure it is running as sometimes missing perl modules mean that it
never runs but people don’t always realize.
Purge By Age To delete events that are older than 7 days, create a new filter with “Date” set to “less
than” and a value of “-7 days”, sort by “date/time” in “asc”ending order, then enable the checkbox
“delete all matches”. You can also use a value of week or week and days: “-2 week” or “-2 week 4 day”
Save with ‘Run Filter In Background’ enabled to have it run automatically. Optional skip archived
events: click on the plus sign next to -7 days to add another condition. “and” “archive status” equal
to “unarchived only”.
Optional slow delete: limit the number of results to 3. If you have a large backlog of events that
would be deleted, this can hard spike the CPU usage for a long time. Limiting the number of results to
only the first three each time the filter is run spreads out the delete processes over time, dramatically
lessening the CPU load.
There are two methods for ZM to remove files when they are deleted that can be found in Options under the
System tab ZM_OPT_FAST_DELETE and ZM_RUN_AUDIT.
ZM_OPT_FAST_DELETE:
Normally an event created as the result of an alarm consists of entries in one or more database tables
plus the various files associated with it. When deleting events in the browser it can take a long time to
remove all of this if you are trying to do a lot of events at once. If you are running on an older or
under-powered system, you may want to set this option which means that the browser client only deletes
the key entries in the events table, which means the events will no longer appear in the listing, and
leaves the zmaudit daemon to clear up the rest later. If you do so, disk space will not be freed
immediately so you will need to run zmaudit more frequently. On modern systems, we recommend that you
leave this off.
ZM_RUN_AUDIT:
The zmaudit daemon exists to check that the saved information in the database and on the file system
match and are consistent with each other. If an error occurs or if you are using ‘fast deletes’ it may be
that database records are deleted but files remain. In this case, and similar, zmaudit will remove
redundant information to synchronize the two data stores. This option controls whether zmaudit is run in
the background and performs these checks and fixes continuously. This is recommended for most systems
however if you have a very large number of events the process of scanning the database and file system
may take a long time and impact performance. In this case you may prefer to not have zmaudit running
unconditionally and schedule occasional checks at other, more convenient, times.
ZM_AUDIT_CHECK_INTERVAL:
The zmaudit daemon exists to check that the saved information in the database and on the files system
match and are consistent with each other. If an error occurs or if you are using ‘fast deletes’ it may be
that database records are deleted but files remain. In this case, and similar, zmaudit will remove
redundant information to synchronize the two data stores. The default check interval of 900 seconds (15
minutes) is fine for most systems however if you have a very large number of events the process of
scanning the database and file system may take a long time and impact performance. In this case you may
prefer to make this interval much larger to reduce the impact on your system. This option determines how
often these checks are performed.
Math for Memory: Making sure you have enough memory to handle your cameras
One of the most common issues for erratic ZoneMinder behavior is you don’t have enough memory to handle
all your cameras. Many users often configure multiple HD cameras at full resolution and 15FPS or more and
then face various issues about processes failing, blank screens and other completely erratic behavior.
The core reason for all of this is you either don’t have enough memory or horsepower to handle all your
cameras. The solution often is to reduce FPS, reduce cameras or bump up your server capabilities.
Here are some guidelines with examples on how you can figure out how much memory you need. With respect
to CPU, you should benchmark your server using standard unix tools like top, iotop and others to make
sure your CPU load is manageable. ZoneMinder also shows average load on the top right corner of the Web
Console for easy access.
In general a good estimate of memory required would be:
Min Bits of Memory = 20% overhead * (image-width*image-height*image buffer size*target color space*number of cameras)
Where: * image-width and image-height are the width and height of images that your camera is configured
for (in my case, 1280x960). This value is in the Source tab for each monitor * image buffer size is the #
of images ZM will keep in memory (this is used by ZM to make sure it has pre and post images before
detecting an alarm - very useful because by the time an alarm is detected, the reason for the alarm may
move out of view and a buffer is really useful for this, including for analyzing stats/scores). This
value is in the buffers tab for each monitor * target color space is the color depth - 8bit, 24bit or
32bit. It’s again in the source tab of each monitor The 1.2 at the start is basically adding 20% on top
of the calculation to account for image/stream overheads (this is an estimate)
The math breakdown for 4 cameras running at 1280x960 capture, 50 frame buffer, 24 bit color space:
1280*960 = 1,228,800 (bytes)
1,228,800 * (3 bytes for 24 bit) = 3,686,400 (bytes)
3,686,400 * 50 = 184,320,000 (bytes)
184,320,000 * 4 = 737,280,000 (bytes)
737,280,000 / 1024 = 720,000 (Kilobytes)
720,000 / 1024 = 703.125 (Megabytes)
703.125 / 1024 = 0.686 (Gigabytes)
Around 700MB of memory.
So if you have 2GB of memory, you should be all set. Right? Not, really:
• This is just the base memory required to capture the streams. Remember ZM is always capturing
streams irrespective of whether you are actually recording or not - to make sure its image ring
buffer is there with pre images when an alarm kicks in.
• You also need to account for other processes not related to ZM running in your box
• You also need to account for other ZM processes - for example, I noticed the audit daemon takes up a
good amount of memory when it runs, DB updates also take up memory
• If you are using H264 encoding, that buffers a lot of frames in memory as well.
So a good rule of thumb is to make sure you have twice the memory as the calculation above (and if you
are using the ZM server for other purposes, please factor in those memory requirements as well)
Also remember by default ZM only uses 50% of your available memory unless you change it
As it turns out, ZM uses mapped memory and by default, 50% of your physical memory is what this will grow
to. When you reach that limit , ZM breaks down with various errors.
(Note: Mapped memory is applicable when you install ZoneMinder with mapped memory support, which is the
default mode. If you have specifically disabled mapped memory then please see the next FAQ enty on how to
increase shared memory)
A good way to know how much memory is allocated to ZM for its operation is to do a df -h
A sample output on Ubuntu:
pp@camerapc:~$ df -h|grep "Filesystem\|shm"
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 2.6G 923M 1.7G 36% /run/shm
The key item here is tmpfs –> the example above shows we have allocated 1.7G of mapped memory space of
which 36% is used which is a healthy number. If you are seeing Use% going beyond 70% you should probaby
increase the mapped memory.
For example, if you want to increase this limit to 70% of your memory, add the following to /etc/fstab
tmpfs SHMPATH tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid,size=70% 0 0 where SHMPATH is the Mounted on path. Here, that
would be /run/shm. Other systems may be /dev/shm.
What does a ‘Can’t shmget: Invalid argument’ error in my logs mean? (and my camera does not display at higher
resolutions)
(Note: This is applicable for systems that have mapped memory disabled in ZoneMinder. By default, Mapped
memory is enabled and unless you have disabled it manually, please refer to the “Math for Memory”
question above and how to increase mapped memory limits)
This error is discussed in the README in the following excerpt:- ‘’…this is caused by an attempt to
allocate an amount of shared memory greater than your system can handle. The size it requests is based on
the following formula, ring buffer size x image width x image height x 3 (for 24 bit images) + a bit of
overhead.
So, for example:
384x288 capture resolution, that makes: 110 592 pixels
in 24 bit color that's x 3 = 331,776 bytes per frame
by 80 frames ring buffer x80 = 26,542,080 bytes per camera
by 4 cameras x4 = 106,168,320 bytes.
Plus 10% overhead = 116,785,152 bytes
Thats 114,048 kB, respectively 111.38 MB.
If my shared memory is set to 134,217,728, which is exactly 128MB,
that means I shouldn't have any problem.
(Note that 1kbyte = 1024bytes, 1MB = 1024 kB)
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 here
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. Note, this error also sometimes
occurs if you have an old shared memory segment lying around from a previous run that is too small. Use
the ipcs and ipcrm system commands to check and remove it if necessary.’”
You can often find out how many 4KB shared memory pages are available by typing the following :-
# cat /proc/sys/kernel/shmall
2097152
In recent kernels the shmall is set to 2097152 memory pages multiplied by 4096 bytes per page for a total
of 8 GB of shared memory available. You only need to increase the shmall value if you have a computer
with more than 8GB of memory and wish to use more of it for shared memory usage, such as large databases.
The most shared memory bytes you can allocate in one go :-
# cat /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
33554432
In recent kernels the shmmax is set to 33554432 bytes for only 32 MB of maximum shared memory allocatable
at a time, hardly enough for ZoneMinder to go above 320 x 240 x 24-bit resolution at 40 frames in the
buffer if it is using the /dev/shm shared memory device, so this value needs to be increased. If you are
using ZoneMinder with the memory mapped (mmap) compile time option then this doesn’t affect you.
To change the value to 128 MB temporarily during this kernel execution type (for example) :- echo
536870912 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
Be sure to restart ZoneMinder after this.
However be aware that sometimes you will only need to change the shmmax value as shmall is often large
enough. Also changing these values in this way is only effective until your machine is rebooted.
To change them permanently you will need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following lines (for
example) :- kernel.shmmax = 536870912
Or if your distribution has the /etc/sysctl.d/ folder you can create a file in this folder without
modifying the /etc/sysctl.d so you won’t lose the changes during distro upgrades :- `echo kernel.shmmax =
536870912 >/etc/sysctl.d/60-kernel-shm.conf`
To load these settings in the sysctl.conf file type: sysctl -p
To check your shared memory settings type: ipcs -l
Note that with Megapixel cameras like the Axis 207mw becoming cheaper and more attractive, the above
memory settings are not adequate. To get Zoneminder working with a full 1280x1024 resolution camera in
full color, increase 134217728 (128 MB) to, for example, 268435456 (256 MB) and multiple this value by
each camera.
These changes will now also be set the next time your machine is restarted.
Versions 1.24.x of ZoneMinder also allows you to use an alternate method of shared memory allocation,
Mmap mapped memory . This requires less configuration and can be simpler to use. Mapped memory allows you
to use a special type of file as the placeholder for your memory and this file is ‘mapped’ into memory
space for easy and fast access.
To enable mapped memory in ZoneMinder you need add add the –enable–mmap=yes switch to your configure
line. By default mapped memory files are created in /dev/shm which on most distributions is a dedicated
pseudo-partition containing memory formatted as a filesystem. If your system uses a different path then
this can be changed in ZoneMinder in Options->paths->PATH_MAP. It uses a filesystem type called tmpfs. If
you type df -h you should see this area and the size of memory it currently allows. To increase size for
tmpfs you need to edit /etc/default/tmpfs. Search for: SHM_SIZE=128M and change to something like
SHM_SIZE=1G then reboot the system. You could possibly need to change RUN_SIZE, too.
It is important that you do not use a disk based filesystem for your memory mapped files as this will
cause memory access to be extremely slow. ZoneMinder creates files called .zm.mmap.<monitor id> in the
mapped memory filesystem.
Mapped memory is subject to the same limitations in terms of total memory as using more traditional
shared memory but does not require any configuration per allocation or chunk. In future versions of
ZoneMinder this will be the default shared memory storage method.
Another good article about shared memory settings can be found here .
The essential difference was that the kernel.shmall setting is NOT in a direct memory setting in KB but
in pages of memory. it is Max Pages of memory
For example: If you want to allocate a maximum memory setting to 8GB you have to convert it to the number
of pages (or segments). with a page size of 4096. kernel.shmall = 8000x1024x1024/4096 kernel.shmall =
2097152 NOT 8388608000 as would be suggested in the RedHat article linked above.
shmmax is the max amount to allocate in one request - this is is an actual memory size (as opposed to
pages) set to 4GB kernel.shmmax = 4294967296
The /etc/sysctl.conf would have these lines
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 4294967296</pre>
As above, reload your sysctl.conf with sysctl -p and check that the settings are correct with ipcs -l.
I have enabled motion detection but it is not always being triggered when things happen in the camera view
ZoneMinder uses zones to examine images for motion detection. When you create the initial zones you can
choose from a number of preset values for sensitivity etc. Whilst these are usually a good starting point
they are not always suitable for all situations and you will probably need to tweak the values for your
specific circumstances. The meanings of the various settings are described in the documentation (here)
however if you believe you have sensible settings configured then there are two diagnostic approaches you
can use.
Another user contributed illustrated Zone definition guide can be found here: An illustrated guide to
Zones
Event Statistics
The first technique is to use event statistics. Firstly you should ensure they are switched on in
Options->Logging->RECORD_EVENT_STATS. This will then cause the raw motion detection statistics for any
subsequently generated events to be written to the DB. These can then be accessed by first clicking on
the Frames or Alarm Frames values of the event from any event list view in the web gui. Then click on the
score value to see the actual values that caused the event. Alternatively the stats can be accessed by
clicking on the ‘Stats’ link when viewing any individual frame. The values displayed there correspond
with the values that are used in the zone configuration and give you an idea of what ‘real world’ values
are being generated.
Note that if you are investigating why events ‘do not’ happen then these will not be saved and so won’t
be accessible. The best thing to do in that circumstance is to make your zone more sensitive so that it
captures all events (perhap even ones you don’t want) so you can get an idea of what values are being
generated and then start to adjust back to less sensitive settings if necessary. You should make sure you
test your settings under a variety of lighting conditions (e.g. day and night, sunny or dull) to get the
best feel for that works and what doesn’t.
Using statistics will slow your system down to a small degree and use a little extra disk space in the DB
so once you are happy you can switch them off again. However it is perfectly feasible to keep them
permanently on if your system is able to cope which will allow you to review your setting periodically.
Diagnostic Images
The second approach is to use diagnostic images which are saved copies of the intermediate images that ZM
uses when determining motion detection. These are switched on and off using
Options->Logging->RECORD_DIAG_IMAGES.
There are two kinds of diagnostic images which are and are written (and continuously overwritten) to the
top level monitor event directory. If an event occurs then the files are additionally copied to the event
directory and renamed with the appropriate frame number as a prefix.
The first set are produced by the monitor on the image as a whole. The diag-r.jpg image is the current
reference image against which all individual frames are compared and the diag-d.jpg image is the delta
image highlighting the difference between the reference image and the last analysed image. In this images
identical pixels will be black and the more different a pixel is the whiter it will be. Viewing this
image and determining the colour of the pixels is a good way of getting a feel for the pixel differences
you might expect (often more than you think).
The second set of diag images are labelled as diag-<zoneid>-<stage>.jpg where zoneid is the id of the
zone in question (Smile) and the stage is where in the alarm check process the image is generated from.
So if you have several zones you can expect to see multiple files. Also these files are only interested
in what is happening in their zone only and will ignore anything else outside of the zone. The stages
that each number represents are as follows,
# Alarmed Pixels - This image shows all pixels in the zone that are considered to be alarmed as white
pixels and all other pixels as black. # Filtered Pixels - This is as stage one except that all pixels
removed by the filters are now black. The white pixels represent the pixels that are candidates to
generate an event. # Raw Blobs - This image contains all alarmed pixels from stage 2 but aggrageted into
blobs. Each blob will have a different greyscale value (between 1 and 254) so they can be difficult to
spot with the naked eye but using a colour picker or photoshop will make it easier to see what blob is
what. # Filtered Blobs - This image is as stage 3 but under (or over) sized blobs have been removed.
This is the final step before determining if an event has occurred, just prior to the number of blobs
being counted. Thus this image forms the basis for determining whether an event is generated and
outlining on alarmed images is done from the blobs in this image.
Using the above images you should be able to tell at all stages what ZM is doing to determine if an event
should happen or not. They are useful diagnostic tools but as is mentioned elsewhere they will massively
slow your system down and take up a great deal more space. You should never leave ZM running for any
length of time with diagnostic images on.
Why can’t ZoneMinder capture images (either at all or just particularly fast) when I can see my camera just
fine in xawtv or similar?
With capture cards ZoneMinder will pull images as fast as it possibly can unless limited by
configuration. ZoneMinder (and any similar application) uses the frame grabber interface to copy frames
from video memory into user memory. This takes some time, plus if you have several inputs sharing one
capture chip it has to switch between inputs between captures which further slows things down.
On average a card that can capture at 25fps per chip PAL for one input will do maybe 6-10fps for two,
1-4fps for three and 1-2 for four. For a 30fps NTSC chip the figures will be correspondingly higher.
However sometimes it is necessary to slow down capture even further as after an input switch it may take
a short while for the new image to settle before it can be captured without corruption.
When using xawtv etc to view the stream you are not looking at an image captured using the frame grabber
but the card’s video memory mapped onto your screen. This requires no capture or processing unless you do
an explicit capture via the J or ctrl-J keys for instance. Some cards or drivers do not support the frame
grabber interface at all so may not work with ZoneMinder even though you can view the stream in xawtv. If
you can grab a still using the grab functionality of xawtv then in general your card will work with
ZoneMinder.
Why can’t I see streamed images when I can see stills in the Zone window etc?
This issue is normally down to one of two causes
1. You are using Internet Explorer and are trying to view multi-part jpeg streams. IE does not support
these streams directly, unlike most other browsers. You will need to install Cambozola or another
multi-part jpeg aware plugin to view them. To do this you will need to obtain the applet from the
Downloads page and install the cambozola.jar file in the same directory as the ZoneMinder php files.
Then find the ZoneMinder Options->Images page and enable ZM_OPT_CAMBOZOLA and enter the web path to
the .jar file in ZM_PATH_CAMBOZOLA. This will ordinarily just be cambozola.jar. Provided (Options /
B/W tabs) WEB_H_CAN_STREAM is set to auto and WEB_H_STREAM_METHOD is set to jpeg then Cambozola should
be loaded next time you try and view a stream.
‘’’NOTE’’’: If you find that the Cambozola applet loads in IE but the applet just displays the version #
of Cambozola and the author’s name (as opposed to seeing the streaming images), you may need to chmod
(‘’-rwxrwxr-x’’) your (‘’usr/share/zoneminder/’’) cambozola.jar:
sudo chmod 775 cambozola.jar
Once I did this, images started to stream for me.
2. The other common cause for being unable to view streams is that you have installed the ZoneMinder cgi
binaries (zms and nph-zms) in a different directory than your web server is expecting. Make sure that
the –with-cgidir option you use to the ZoneMinder configure script is the same as the CGI directory
configure for your web server. If you are using Apache, which is the most common one, then in your
httpd.conf file there should be a line like ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/" where the last
directory in the quotes is the one you have specified. If not then change one or the other to match.
Be warned that configuring apache can be complex so changing the one passed to the ZoneMinder
configure (and then rebuilding and reinstalling) is recommended in the first instance. If you change
the apache config you will need to restart apache for the changes to take effect. If you still cannot
see stream reliably then try changing Options->Paths->ZM_PATH_ZMS to just use zms if nph-zms is
specified, or vice versa. Also check in your apache error logs.
Also, please check the value of the ZM_PATH_ZMS setting under the Paths Options tab. It is where you
configure the URL to the zms or nph-zms CGI executable. Under most Debian-based distros this value
should be /zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms but in the past may have been /cgi-bin/nph-zms or you may have configured
it to be something else.
Lastly, please look for errors created by the zmc processes. If zmc isn’t running, then zms will not be
able to get an image from it and will exit.
I have several monitors configured but when I load the Montage view in FireFox why can I only see two? or,
Why don’t all my cameras display when I use the Montage view in FireFox?
By default FireFox only supports a small number of simultaneous connections. Using the montage view
usually requires one persistent connection for each camera plus intermittent connections for other
information such as statuses.
You will need to increase the number of allowed connections to use the montage view with more than a
small number of cameras. Certain FireFox extensions such as FasterFox may also help to achieve the same
result.
To resolve this situation, follow the instructions below:
Enter about:config in the address bar
scroll down to browser.cache.check_doc_frequency 3 change the 3 to a 1
browser.cache.disk.enable True -> False
network.http.max-connections-per-server -> put a value of 100
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy -> 100 again
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server -> 100 again
Why is ZoneMinder using so much CPU?
The various elements of ZoneMinder can be involved in some pretty intensive activity, especially while
analysing images for motion. However generally this should not overwhelm your machine unless it is very
old or underpowered.
There are a number of specific reasons why processor loads can be high either by design or by accident.
To figure out exactly what is causing it in your circumstances requires a bit of experimentation.
The main causes are.
• Using a video palette other than greyscale or RGB24. This can cause a relatively minor performance
hit, though still significant. Although some cameras and cards require using planar palettes ZM
currently doesn’t support this format internally and each frame is converted to an RGB
representation prior to processing. Unless you have compelling reasons for using YUV or reduced RGB
type palettes such as hitting USB transfer limits I would experiment to see if RGB24 or greyscale is
quicker. Put your monitors into ‘Monitor’ mode so that only the capture daemons are running and
monitor the process load of these (the ‘zmc’ processes) using top. Try it with various palettes to
see if it makes a difference.
• Big image sizes. A image of 640x480 requires at least four times the processing of a 320x240 image.
Experiment with different sizes to see what effect it may have. Sometimes a large image is just two
interlaced smaller frames so has no real benefit anyway. This is especially true for analog
cameras/cards as image height over 320 (NTSC) or 352 PAL) are invariably interlaced.
• Capture frame rates. Unless there’s a compelling reason in your case there is often little benefit
in running cameras at 25fps when 5-10fps would often get you results just as good. Try changing your
monitor settings to limit your cameras to lower frame rates. You can still configure ZM to ignore
these limits and capture as fast as possible when motion is detected.
• Run function. Obviously running in Record or Mocord modes or in Modect with lots of events generates
a lot of DB and file activity and so CPU and load will increase.
• Basic default detection zones. By default when a camera is added one detection zone is added which
covers the whole image with a default set of parameters. If your camera covers a view in which
various regions are unlikely to generate a valid alarm (ie the sky) then I would experiment with
reducing the zone sizes or adding inactive zones to blank out areas you don’t want to monitor.
Additionally the actual settings of the zone themselves may not be optimal. When doing motion
detection the number of changed pixels above a threshold is examined, then this is filter, then
contiguous regions are calculated to see if an alarm is generated. If any maximum or minimum
threshold is exceeded according to your zone settings at any time the calculation stops. If your
settings always result in the calculations going through to the last stage before being failed then
additional CPU time is used unnecessarily. Make sure your maximum and minimumzone thresholds are set
to sensible values and experiment by switching RECORD_EVENT_STATS on and seeing what the actual
values of alarmed pixels etc are during sample events.
• Optimise your settings. After you’ve got some settings you’re happy with then switching off
RECORD_EVENT_STATS will prevent the statistics being written to the database which saves some time.
Other settings which might make a difference are ZM_FAST_RGB_DIFFS and the JPEG_xxx_QUALITY ones.
I’m sure there are other things which might make a difference such as what else you have running on the
box and memory sizes (make sure there’s no swapping going on). Also speed of disk etc will make some
difference during event capture and also if you are watching the whole time then you may have a bunch of
zms processes running also.
I think the biggest factors are image size, colour depth and capture rate. Having said that I also don’t
always know why you get certains results from ‘top’. For instance if I have a ‘zma’ daemon running for a
monitor that is capturing an image. I’ve commented out the actual analysis so all it’s doing is blending
the image with the previous one. In colour mode this takes ~11 milliseconds per frame on my system and
the camera is capturing at ~10fps. Using ‘top’ this reports the process as using ~5% of CPU and
permanently in R(un) state. Changing to greyscale mode the blending takes ~4msec (as you would expect as
this is roughly a third of 11) but top reports the process as now with 0% CPU and permanently in S(leep)
state. So an actual CPU resource usage change of a factor of 3 causes huge differences in reported CPU
usage. I have yet to get to the bottom of this but I suspect it’s to do with scheduling somewhere along
the line and that maybe the greyscale processing will fit into one scheduling time slice whereas the
colour one won’t but I have no evidence of this yet!
Why is the timeline view all messed up?
The timeline view is a new view allowing you to see a graph of alarm activity over time and to quickly
scan and home in on events of interest. However this feature is highly complex and still in beta. It is
based extensively on HTML div tags, sometimes lots of them. Whilst FireFox is able to render this view
successfully other browsers, particular Internet Explorer do not seem able to cope and so present a
messed up view, either always or when there are a lot of events. Using the timeline view is only
recommended when using FireFox, however even then there may be issues.
This function has from time to time been corrupted in the SVN release or in the stable releases, try and
reinstall from a fresh download.
How much Hard Disk Space / Bandwidth do I need for ZM?
Please see this excel sheet or this online excel sheet (both are user contributed excel sheets)
Or go to this link for the Axis bandwidth calculator. Although this is aimed at Axis cameras it still
produces valid results for any kind of IP camera.
As a quick guide I have 4 cameras at 320x240 storing 1 fps except during alarm events. After 1 week 60GB
of space in the volume where the events are stored (/var/www/html/zm) has been used.
When I try and run ZoneMinder I get lots of audit permission errors in the logs and it won’t start
Many Linux distributions nowadays are built with security in mind. One of the latest methods of achieving
this is via SELinux (Secure Linux) which controls who is able to run what in a more precise way then
traditional accounting and file based permissions (link). If you are seeing entries in your system log
like:
Jun 11 20:44:02 kernel: audit(1150033442.443:226): avc: denied { read } for pid=5068 comm=”uptime”
name=”utmp” dev=dm-0 ino=16908345 scontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_sys_script_t
tcontext=user_u:object_r:initrc_var_run_t tclass=file
then it is likely that your system has SELinux enabled and it is preventing ZoneMinder from performaing
certain activities. You then have two choices. You can either tune SELinux to permit the required
operations or you can disable SELinux entirely which will permit ZoneMinder to run unhindered. Disabling
SELinux is usually performed by editing its configuration file (e.g., /etc/selinux/config) and then
rebooting. However if you run a public server you should read up on the risks associated with disabled
Secure Linux before disabling it.
Note that SELinux may cause errors other than those listed above. If you are in any doubt then it can be
worth disabling SELinux experimentally to see if it fixes your problem before trying other solutions.
How do I enable ZoneMinder’s security?
In the console, click on Options. Check the box next to “ZM_OPT_USE_AUTH”. You will immediately be asked
to login. The default username is ‘admin’ and the password is ‘admin’.
To Manage Users: In main console, go to Options->Users.
You may also consider to use the web server security, for example, htaccess files under Apache scope; You
may even use this as an additional/redundant security on top of Zoneminders built-in security features;
Why does ZM stop recording once I have 32000 events for my monitor?
Storing more than 32k files in a single folder is a limitation of some filesystems. To avoid this, enable
USE_DEEP_STORAGE under Options.
USE_DEEP_STORAGE is now the default for new ZoneMinder systems so this limitation should only apply to
users upgrading from a previous version of ZoneMinder.
Versions of ZM from 1.23.0 onwards allow you to have a deeper filesystem with fewer files per individual
directory. As well as not being susceptible to the 32k limit, this is also somewhat faster.
If you have upgraded from a previous version of ZoneMinder and this option is not already enabled, it is
very important to follow the steps below to enable it on an existing system. Failure to properly follow
these steps WILL RESULT IN LOSS OF YOUR DATA!
# Stop ZoneMinder
# Backup your event data and the dB if you have the available storage
# Enable USE_DEEP_STORAGE under Options.
# From the command line, run "sudo zmupdate.pl --migrate-events"
# Monitor the output for any events that fail to convert.
# After the conversion completes, you can restart ZoneMinder
Note that you can re-run the migrate-events command if any error messages scroll off the screen.
You can read about the lack of a limit in the number of sub-directories in the ext4 filesystem at: this
link and see what tools may assist in your use of this filesystem here If you search for ext3 or reiserfs
on the forums you will find various threads on this issue with guidance on how to convert.
Managing system load (with IP Cameras in mind)
Introduction
Zoneminder is a superb application in every way, but it does a job that needs a lot of horsepower
especially when using multiple IP cameras. IP Cams require an extra level of processing to analogue cards
as the jpg or mjpeg images need to be decoded before analysing. This needs grunt. If you have lots of
cameras, you need lots of grunt.
Why do ZM need so much grunt? Think what Zoneminder is actually doing. In modect mode ZM is: 1. Fetching
a jpeg from the camera. (Either in single part or multipart stream) 2. Decoding the jpeg image. 3.
Comparing the zoned selections to the previous image or images and applying rules. 4. If in alarm state,
writing that image to the disk and updating the mysql database.
If you’re capturing at five frames per second, the above is repeated five times every second, multiplied
by the number of cameras. Decoding the images is what takes the real power from the processor and this is
the main reason why analogue cameras which present an image ready-decoded in memory take less work.
How do I know if my computer is overloaded?
If your CPU is running at 100% all the time, it’s probably overloaded (or running at exact optimisation).
If the load is consistently high (over 10.0 for a single processor) then Bad Things happen - like lost
frames, unrecorded events etc. Occasional peaks are fine, normal and nothing to worry about.
Zoneminder runs on Linux, Linux measures system load using “load”, which is complicated but gives a rough
guide on what the computer is doing at any given time. Zoneminder shows Load on the main page (top right)
as well as disk space. Typing “uptime” on the command line will give a similar guide, but with three
figures to give a fuller measure of what’s happening over a period of time but for the best guide to see
what’s happening, install “htop” - which gives easy to read graphs for load, memory and cpu usage.
A load of 1.0 means the processor has “just enough to do right now”. Also worth noting that a load of 4.0
means exactly the same for a quad processor machine - each number equals a single processor’s workload. A
very high load can be fine on a computer that has a stacked workload - such as a machine sending out bulk
emails, or working its way through a knotty problem; it’ll just keep churning away until it’s done.
However - Zoneminder needs to process information in real time so it can’t afford to stack its jobs, it
needs to deal with them right away.
For a better and full explanation of Load: Please read this
My load is too high, how can I reduce it?
(The previous documentation explained how to use turbo jpeg libraries as an optimization technique. These
libraries have long been part of standard linux distros since that article was authored and hence that
section has been removed)
Zoneminder is very tweakable and it’s possible to tune it to compromise. The following are good things to
try, in no particular order;
• If your camera allows you to change image size, think whether you can get away with smaller images.
Smaller pics = less load. 320x240 is usually ok for close-up corridor shots.
• Go Black and White. Colour pictures use twice to three times the CPU, memory and diskspace but give
little benefit to identification.
• Reduce frames per second. Halve the fps, halve the workload. If your camera supports fps throttling
(Axis do), try that - saves ZM having to drop frames from a stream. 2-5 fps seems to be widely used.
• Experiment with using jpeg instead of mjpeg. Some users have reported it gives better performance,
but YMMV.
• Tweak the zones. Keep them as small and as few as possible. Stick to one zone unless you really need
more. Read this for an easy to understand explanation along with the official Zone guide.
• Schedule. If you are running a linux system at near capacity, you’ll need to think carefully about
things like backups and scheduled tasks. updatedb - the process which maintains a file database so
that ‘locate’ works quickly, is normally scheduled to run once a day and if on a busy system can
create a heavy increase on the load. The same is true for scheduled backups, especially those which
compress the files. Re-schedule these tasks to a time when the cpu is less likely to be busy, if
possible - and also use the “nice” command to reduce their priority. (crontab and /etc/cron.daily/
are good places to start)
• Reduce clutter on your PC. Don’t run X unless you really need it, the GUI is a huge overhead in both
memory and cpu.
More expensive options:
• Increase RAM. If your system is having to use disk swap it will HUGELY impact performance in all
areas. Again, htop is a good monitor - but first you need to understand that because Linux is using
all the memory, it doesn’t mean it needs it all - linux handles ram very differently to Windows/DOS
and caches stuff. htop will show cached ram as a different colour in the memory graph. Also check
that you’re actually using a high memory capable kernel - many kernels don’t enable high memory by
default.
• Faster CPU. Simple but effective. Zoneminder also works very well with multiple processor systems
out of the box (if SMP is enabled in your kernel). The load of different cameras is spread across
the processors.
• Try building Zoneminder with processor specific instructions that are optimised to the system it
will be running on, also increasing the optimisation level of GCC beyond -O2 will help.
./configure CFLAGS="-g -O3 -march=athlon-xp -mtune=athlon-xp" CXXFLAGS="-g -O3 -march=athlon-xp -mtune=athlon-xp"
The above command is optimised for an Athlon XP cpu so you will need to use the specific processor tag
for your cpu, also the compiler optimisation has been increased to -O3.
You also need to put in your normal ./configure commands as if you were compiling with out this
optimisation.
A further note is that the compile must be performed on the system that Zoneminder will be running on as
this optimisation will make it hardware specific code.
Processor specific commands can be found in the GCC manual along with some more options that may increase
performanc.
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/i386-and-x86_002d64-Options.html#i386-and-x86_002d64-Options
The below command has been used to compile Zoneminder on a Athlon XP system running CentOS 5.5 and along
with the libjpeg-turbo modification to reduce the CPU load in half, libjpeg-turbo reduced the load by 1/3
before the processor optimisation.
./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/html/zm --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin CFLAGS="-g -O3 -march=athlon-xp -mtune=athlon-xp" CXXFLAGS="-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -g -O3 -march=athlon-xp -mtune=athlon-xp" --enable-mmap --sysconfdir=/etc/zm
The following command has been used to compile Zoneminder 1.25 on a CentOS 6.0 system, the native command
should choose the processor automatically during compile time, this needs to be performed on the actual
system!!.
CFLAGS="-g -O3 -march=native -mtune=native" CXXFLAGS="-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -g -O3 -march=native -mtune=native" ./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/html/zm --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin --with-webuser=apache --with-webgroup=apache ZM_DB_HOST=localhost ZM_DB_NAME=zm ZM_DB_USER=your_zm_user ZM_DB_PASS=your_zm_password ZM_SSL_LIB=openssl
What about disks and bandwidth?
A typical 100mbit LAN will cope with most setups easily. If you’re feeding from cameras over smaller or
internet links, obviously fps will be much lower.
Disk and Bandwidth calculators are referenced on the Zoneminder wiki here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/FAQ#How_much_Hard_Disk_Space_.2F_Bandwidth_do_I_need_for_ZM.3F
Building ZoneMinder
When running configure I am getting a lot of messages about not being able to compile the ffmpeg libraries
If you see output from configure that looks like this
checking libavcodec/avcodec.h usability... no
checking libavcodec/avcodec.h presence... yes
configure: WARNING: libavcodec/avcodec.h: present but cannot be compiled
configure: WARNING: libavcodec/avcodec.h: check for missing
prerequisite headers?
configure: WARNING: libavcodec/avcodec.h: see the Autoconf documentation
configure: WARNING: libavcodec/avcodec.h: section "Present But
Cannot Be Compiled"
configure: WARNING: libavcodec/avcodec.h: proceeding with the compiler's
result
configure: WARNING: ## ------------------------------------- ##
configure: WARNING: ## Report this to support@zoneminder.com ##
configure: WARNING: ## ------------------------------------- ##</pre>
then it is caused not by the ZoneMinder build system but ffmpeg itself. However there is a workaround you
can use which is to add CPPFLAGS=-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS
to the ZoneMinder ./configure command which should solve the issue. However this is not a proper ‘fix’ as
such, which can only come from the ffmpeg project itself.
I cannot build ZoneMinder and am getting lots of undefined C++ template errors
This is almost certainly due to the ‘ccache’ package which attempts to speed up compilation by caching
compiled objects. Unfortunately one of the side effects is that it breaks the GNU g++ template resolution
method that ZoneMinder uses in building by prevent files getting recompiled. The simplest way around this
is to remove the ccache package using your distros package manager.
How do I build for X10 support?
You do not need to rebuild ZM for X10 support. You will need to install the perl module and switch on X10
in the options, then restart. Installing the perl module is covered in the README amongst other places
but in summary, do:
perl -MCPAN -eshell install X10::ActiveHome quit
Extending Zoneminder
How can I get ZM to do different things at different times of day or week?
If you want to configure ZoneMinder to do motion detection during the day and just record at night, for
example, you will need to use ZoneMinder ‘run states’. A run state is a particular configuration of
monitor functions that you want to use at any time.
To save a run state you should first configure your monitors for Modect, Record, Monitor etc as you would
want them during one of the times of day. Then click on the running state link at the top of the Console
view. This will usually say ‘Running’ or ‘Stopped’. You will then be able to save the current state and
give it a name, ‘Daytime’ for example. Now configure your monitors how you would want them during other
times of day and save that, for instance as ‘Nighttime’.
Now you can switch between these two states by selecting them from the same dialog you saved them, or
from the command line from issue the command ‘’zmpkg.pl <run state>’’, for example ‘’zmpkg.pl Daytime’’.
The final step you need to take, is scheduling the time the changes take effect. For this you can use
cron. A simple entry to change to the Daylight state at at 8am and to the nighttime state at 8pm would be
as follows,
0 8 * * * root /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl Daytime
0 20 * * * root /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl Nighttime
On Ubuntu 7.04 and possibly others, look in /usr/bin not just /usr/local/bin for the zmpkg.pl file.
Although the example above describes changing states at different times of day, the same principle can
equally be applied to days of the week or other more arbitrary periods.
How can I use ZoneMinder to trigger something else when there is an alarm?
ZoneMinder includes a perl API which means you can create a script to interact with the ZM shared memory
data and use it in your own scripts to react to ZM alarms or to trigger ZM to generate new alarms. Full
details are in the README or by doing perldoc ZoneMinder, perldoc ZoneMinder::SharedMem etc. Below is an
example script that checks all monitors for alarms and when one occurs, prints a message to the screen.
You can add in your own code to make this reaction a little more useful.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use ZoneMinder;
$| = 1;
zmDbgInit( "myscript", level=>0, to_log=>0, to_syslog=>0, to_term=>1 );
my $dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI:mysql:database=".ZM_DB_NAME.";host=".ZM_DB_HOST, ZM_DB_USER, ZM_DB_PASS );
my $sql = "select M.*, max(E.Id) as LastEventId from Monitors as M left join Events as E on M.Id = E.MonitorId where M.Function != 'None' group by (M.Id)";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare_cached( $sql ) or die( "Can't prepare '$sql': ".$dbh->errstr() );
my $res = $sth->execute() or die( "Can't execute '$sql': ".$sth->errstr() );
my @monitors;
while ( my $monitor = $sth->fetchrow_hashref() )
{
push( @monitors, $monitor );
}
while( 1 )
{
foreach my $monitor ( @monitors )
{
next if ( !zmMemVerify( $monitor ) );
if ( my $last_event_id = zmHasAlarmed( $monitor, $monitor->{LastEventId} ) )
{
$monitor->{LastEventId} = $last_event_id;
print( "Monitor ".$monitor->{Name}." has alarmed\n" );
#
# Do your stuff here
#
}
}
sleep( 1 );
}
Trouble Shooting
Here are some things that will help you track down whats wrong. This is also how to obtain the info that
we need to help you on the forums.
What logs should I check for errors?
ZoneMinder creates its own logs and are usually located in the /tmp directory.
The ZoneMinder logs for the RPM packages are located in /var/log/zm.
Depending on your problem errors can show up in any of these logs but, usually the logs of interest are
zmdc.log and zmpkg.log if ZM is not able to start.
Now since ZM is dependent on other components to work, you might not find errors in ZM but in the other
components.
*/var/log/messages and/or /var/log/syslog
*/var/log/dmesg
*/var/log/httpd/error_log`` (RedHat/Fedora) or ``/var/log/apache2/error_log
*/var/log/mysqld.log`` (Errors here don't happen very often but just in case)
If ZM is not functioning, you should always be able to find an error in at least one of these logs. Use
the [[tail]] command to get info from the logs. This can be done like so:
tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/httpd/error_log /var/log/zm/zm*.log
This will append any data entered to any of these logs to your console screen (-f). To exit, hit [ctrl
-c].
More verbose logging for the ZoneMinder binaries is available by enabling the debug option from the
control panel and will be placed in the path you have configured for the debug logs. Output can be
limited to a specific binary as described in the Debug options page under the “?” marks.
How can I trouble shoot the hardware and/or software?
Here are some commands to get information about your hardware. Some commands are distribution dependent.
* [[lspci]] -vv – Returns lots of detailed info. Check for conflicting interrupts or port assignments.
You can sometimes alter interrupts/ ports in bios. Try a different pci slot to get a clue if it is HW
conflict (command provided by the pciutils package). * [[scanpci]] -v – Gives you information from your
hardware EPROM * [[lsusb]] -vv – Returns lots of detail about USB devices (camand provided by usbutils
package). * [[dmesg]] – Shows you how your hardware initialized (or didn’t) on boot-up. You will get the
most use of this. * [[v4l-info]] – to see how driver is talking to card. look for unusual values. *
[[modinfo bttv]] – some bttv driver stats. * [[zmu]] -m 0 -q -v – Returns various information regarding
a monitor configuration. * [[ipcs]] `` -- Provides information on the ipc facilities for which the
calling process has read access. * ``[[ipcrm]] `` -- The ipcrm command can be used to remove an IPC
object from the kernel. * ``cat /proc/interrupts – This will dispaly what interrupts your hardware is
using.
Why am I getting a 403 access error with my web browser when trying to access http //localhost/zm?
The apache web server needs to have the right permissions and configuration to be able to read the
Zoneminder files. Check the forums for solution, and edit the apache configuration and change directory
permissions to give apache the right to read the Zoneminder files. Depending on your Zoneminder
configuration, you would use the zm user and group that Zoneminder was built with, such as wwwuser and
www.
Why am I getting broken images when trying to view events?
Zoneminder and the Apache web server need to have the right permissions. Check this forum topic and
similar ones: http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=48754#48754
Why is the image from my color camera appearing in black and white?
If you recently upgraded to zoneminder 1.26, there is a per camera option that defaults to black and
white and can be mis-set if your upgrade didn’t happen right. See this thread:
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=21344
This may occur if you have a NTSC analog camera but have configured the source in ZoneMinder as PAL for
the Device Format under the source tab. You may also be mislead because zmu can report the video port as
being PAL when the camera is actually NTSC. Confirm the format of your analog camera by checking it’s
technical specifications, possibly found with the packaging it came in, on the manufacturers website, or
even on the retail website where you purchased the camera. Change the Device Format setting to NTSC and
set it to the lowest resolution of 320 x 240. If you have confirmed that the camera itself is NTSC
format, but don’t get a picture using the NTSC setting, consider increasing the shared memory
‘’’kernel.shmall’’’ and ‘’’kernel.shmmax’’’ settings in /etc/sysctl.conf to a larger value such as
268435456. This is also the reason you should start with the 320x240 resolution, so as to minimize the
potential of memory problems which would interfere with your attempts to troubleshoot the device format
issue. Once you have obtained a picture in the monitor using the NTSC format, then you can experiment
with raising the resolution.
Why do I only see blue screens with a timestamp when monitoring my camera?
If this camera is attached to a capture card, then you may have selected the wrong Device Source or
Channel when configuring the monitor in the ZoneMinder console. If you have a capture card with 2 D-sub
style inputs(looks like a VGA port) to which you attach a provided splitter that splits off multiple
cables, then the splitter may be attached to the wrong port. For example, PV-149 capture cards have two
D-sub style ports labeled as DB1 and DB2, and come packaged with a connector for one of these ports that
splits into 4 BNC connecters. The initial four video ports are available with the splitter attached to
DB1.
Why do I only see black screens with a timestamp when monitoring my camera?
In the monitor windows where you see the black screen with a timestamp, select settings and enter the
Brightness, Contrast, Hue, and Color settings reported for the device by ‘’’zmu -d <device_path> -q
-v’’’. 32768 may be appropriate values to try for these settings. After saving the settings, select
Settings again to confirm they saved successfully.
I am getting messages about a backtrace in my logs, what do I do?
If you are seeing entries in your log like the following
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /lib64/libc.so.6 [0x3347230210]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /lib64/libc.so.6(memset+0xce) [0x334727684e]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /usr/local/bin/zma [0x40ee9a]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /usr/local/bin/zma [0x419946]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /usr/local/bin/zma [0x4213cf]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /usr/local/bin/zma(cos+0x35c) [0x404674]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf4) [0x334721da44]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: ERR [Backtrace: /usr/local/bin/zma(cos+0xd1) [0x4043e9]]
Jan 11 20:25:22 localhost zma_m2[19051]: INF [Backtrace complete]</pre>
then you can help diagnose the problem by running a special command to translate the hex addresses into
helpful information. This command is called addr2line and you can type ‘man addr2line’ for more
information. Basically addr2line takes two sets of parameters, the first is the name of the binary file,
and the second is a list of addresses. Both of these pieces of information are displayed in the logs. The
filename is the first part after the ‘Backtrace:’ tag, in this case /usr/local/bin/zma, though it may
well be different in your case. Some of the lines refer to libraries rather than the zma executable but
those can be ignored for now, the important part is noting which ZM binary is involved. The binary file
is passed in following the -e flag. The addresses to pass to addr2line are those contained in the ‘[]’
pairs. Again you can ignore those that are on a line that refers to a library but it will not hurt if you
include them. So in the example above, the command would be addr2line -e /usr/local/bin/zma 0x40ee9a
0x419946 0x4213cf 0x404674 0x4043e9 This should then dump out a more symbolic list containing source file
names and line numbers, and it is this information which will be helpful if posted to the forums.
Sometimes addr2line fails to produce useful output. This is usually because either the problem is so
severe that it has corrupted the stack and prevented useful information from being displayed, or that you
have either compiled ZM without the -g flag for debug, or you have stripped the binaries of symbol
information after installation. This this case you would need to rebuild temporarily with debug enabled
for the information to be useful.
This error some times happens when a linked camera looses its link or it is corrupted by the user or some
other system event, try deleting the affected cameras and recreating them in the Zoneminder console.
How do I repair the MySQL Database?
There is two ways to go about this. In most cases you can run from the command prompt -> * mysqlcheck
–all-databases –auto-repair -p’’’your_database_password’’’ -u ‘’’your_databse_user’’’
If that does not work then you will have to make sure that ZoneMinder is stopped then run the following
(nothing should be using the database while running this and you will have to adjust for your correct
path if it is different). -> * myisamchk –silent –force –fast –update-state -O key_buffer=64M -O
sort_buffer=64M -O read_buffer=1M -O write_buffer=1M /var/lib/mysql//.MYI
How do I repair the MySQL Database when the cli fails?
In Ubuntu, the commands listed above do not seem to work. However, actually doing it by hand from within
MySQL does. (But that is beyond the scope of this document) But that got me thinking… And phpmyadmin
does work. Bring up a terminal. sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
Now go to http://zoneminder_IP/ and stop the ZM service. Continue to http://zoneminder_IP/phpmyadmin and
select the zoneminder database. Select and tables marked ‘in use’ and pick the action ‘repare’ to fix.
Restart the zoneminder service from the web browser. Remove or disable the phpmyadmin tool, as it is not
always the most secure thing around, and opens your database wide to any skilled hacker. sudo apt-get
remove phpmyadmin
I upgraded by distribution and ZM stopped working
Some possibilities (Incomplete list and subject to correction) [[/usr/local/bin/zmfix:
/usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so.15: version `MYSQL_5.0' not found (required by /usr/local/bin/zmfix)]] ::
Solution: Recompile and reinstall Zoneminder. Any time you update a major version that ZoneMinder
depends on, you need to recompile ZoneMinder.
Zoneminder doesn’t start automatically on boot
Check the list for log entries like “zmfix[766]: ERR [Can’t connect to server: Can’t connect to local
MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2)] “. What can happen is that zoneminder is
started too quickly after Mysql and tries to contact the database server before it’s ready. Zoneminder
gets no answer and aborts. August 2010 - Ubuntu upgrades seem to be leaving several systems in this
state. One way around this is to add a delay to the zoneminder startup script allowing Mysql to finish
starting. “Simply adding ‘sleep 15’ in the line above ‘zmfix -a’ in the /etc/init.d/zoneminder file
fixed my ZoneMinder startup problems!” - credit to Pada.
Remote Path setup for Panasonic and other Camera
On adding or editing the source you can select the preset link for the parameters for the specified
camera . In version 1.23.3 presets for BTTV,Axis,Panasonic,GadSpot,VEO, and BlueNet are available .
Selecting the presets ZM fills up the required value for the remote path variable
Why do I get repeated/ mixed/unstable/ blank monitors on bt878-like cards (a.k.a. PICO 2000)
Please have a check at [[Pico2000]];
What causes “Invalid JPEG file structure: two SOI markers” from zmc (1.24.x)
Some settings that used to be global only are now per camera. On the Monitor Source tab, if you are
using Remote Protocol “HTTP” and Remote Method “Simple”, try changing Remote Method to “Regexp”.
Miscellaneous
I see ZoneMinder is licensed under the GPL. What does that allow or restrict me in doing with ZoneMinder?
The ZoneMinder license is described at the end of the documentation and consists of the following section
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.
This means that ZoneMinder is licensed under the terms described here. There is a comprehensive FAQ
covering the GPL at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html but in essence you are allowed to
redistribute or modify GPL licensed software provided that you release your distribution or modifications
freely under the same terms. You are allowed to sell systems based on GPL software. You are not allowed
to restrict or reduce the rights of GPL software in your distribution however. Of course if you are just
making modifications for your system locally you are not releasing changes so you have no obligations in
this case. I recommend reading the GPL FAQ for more in-depth coverage of this issue.
Can I use ZoneMinder as part of my commercial product?
The GPL license allows you produce systems based on GPL software provided your systems also adhere to
that license and any modifications you make are also released under the same terms. The GPL does not
permit you to include ZoneMinder in proprietary systems (see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem for details). If you wish to include
ZoneMinder in this kind of system then you will need to license ZoneMinder under different terms. This is
sometimes possible and you will need to contact me for further details in these circumstances.
CONTRIBUTING
Source hosted at GitHub Report issues/questions/feature requests on GitHub Issues
Pull requests are very welcome! If you would like to contribute, please follow the following steps.
• Fork the repo
• Open an issue at our GitHub Issues Tracker. Describe the bug that you’ve found, or the feature which
you’re asking for. Jot down the issue number (e.g. 456)
• Create your feature branch (git checkout -b 456-my-new-feature)
• Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Added some feature') It is preferred that you ‘commit early and
often’ instead of bunching all changes into a single commit.
• Push your branch to your fork on github (git push origin 456-my-new-feature)
• Create new Pull Request
• The team will then review, discuss and hopefully merge your changes.
Welcome to ZoneMinder’s documentation, the following resources are available
userguide/index
Guide to setting up ZoneMinder for the first time and detailed guides for using the ZoneMinder
front end.
api Information on using the CakePHP based API for interfacing to ZoneMinder
faq Frequently Asked Questions
contributing
How to contribute to ZoneMinder. As a community project we always need help, you don’t need to be
a coder to test or update documentation.
• genindex
• modindex
• search
AUTHOR
https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/graphs/contributors
COPYRIGHT
2020, https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/graphs/contributors
Feb 25, 2020 ZONEMINDER(1)