How to make a live feed 'pop up' on external trigger

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JohnE
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 9:38 pm

How to make a live feed 'pop up' on external trigger

Post by JohnE »

Hey all,

I'm the 'camera guy' at a university and we have a number of emergency phones scattered along various trails.

These phones have IP cameras built into their mounts and also have an Axis P8221 Network I/O Audio module inside. The phone is set up in such a way that when the activation button that calls the university police dispatch is pushed, an input on the Axis unit is triggered.

The point of all this is that this input trigger would cause the video from the associated camera to be 'pushed' onto the Milestone video system used by the UPD dispatchers.

However, the Milestone system has never worked all that well for this purpose and now isn't working at all. So rather than trying to dive in and make something work again that we didn't like all that much when it did work, I'm looking at what would be involved in rolling up a system that works the way we like.

Assume a Linux server and monitor in the dispatch area. The Axis modules can send an event notification to an HTTP Server or a TCP Server, so I assume I can set up the Linux server to watch a port for a TCP event or HTTP event.

I'd like that trigger event to initiate a display on the dispatch monitor showing the view from that camera. The cameras used are Arecont Panoramic cameras, so four individual streams would be displayed.

The point of all this is that the dispatchers would see the person and area around the person who initiated the phone call, so I'd want to include a way to blank the display after the phone conversation had been concluded.

So does anyone have any thoughts on what sort of programming 'container' I could use in Linux to display the video from these cameras? I'm open to working on a web server approach or some sort of simple media display in python.

Thanks for any suggestions!
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asker
Posts: 1553
Joined: Sun Mar 01, 2015 12:12 pm

Re: How to make a live feed 'pop up' on external trigger

Post by asker »

Here is one route:

1. You set up ZoneMinder on your server with your Axis cameras
2. You enable OPT_TRIGGERS in ZoneMinder and write a tiny script that triggers an alarm on ZoneMinder when someone calls (or any other trigger)
3. You add zmeventserver to ZoneMinder https://github.com/pliablepixels/zmeventserver
3. You install zmNinja on your phones and configure push notifications to show live feed when a push notification is received.

Blam.
I no longer work on zmNinja, zmeventnotification, pyzm or mlapi. I may respond on occasion based on my available time/interest.

Please read before posting:
How to set up logging properly
How to troubleshoot and report - ES
How to troubleshoot and report - zmNinja
ES docs
zmNinja docs
peter666
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2017 2:43 pm

Re: How to make a live feed 'pop up' on external trigger

Post by peter666 »

> 3. You install zmNinja on your phones and configure push notifications to show live feed when a push notification is received.

I read this documentation:
https://github.com/pliablepixels/zmeven ... -consumers

And I can read there what steps I need to do to configure "Push notification via PushProxy".

I have zmNinja (Desktop) running and I can see the Alerts there. In the upper left is A Bell Ringing when an alert is triggered.

It didnt become clear to me what I need to do to configure zmNinja to automatically show live feed of example of from Monitor3.
It feels like this has to be done in zmNinja somewhere.

Do I neccessarily need the "Push notification via PushProxy" to see the live video on app trigggered by event?
Where is the place I can configure "on Alarm of Monitor3" -> "show live feed on Minitor3 on zmNinja" for 20 Seconds?
rockedge
Posts: 1173
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2014 1:46 pm
Location: Connecticut,USA

Re: How to make a live feed 'pop up' on external trigger

Post by rockedge »

I would use a small script...a PERL daemon that runs alongside zoneminder that monitors for an event trigger from each of these emergency alarm points. The daemon script is simple based on the example zm-alarm.pl. This daemon will on detecting the emergency help button, send a trigger signal to zmTrigger.pl which begins to record the camera at the active emergency station. At the same time the PERL daemon "pushes" a pop up window with a live camera stream from the now active camera to the dispatcher's display..... or something along these lines.

I also think the method @asker suggests would work reliably as well.
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