The first catch was that it's an amd64, so I needed to re-build ZoneMinder, and it seemed like a good idea to get up to the latest version whilst I was about it. The Gentoo ebuild, when un-masked (it's ~amd64) tried to pull in a whole bunch of perl stuff that demanded perl 5.10.0 (which is itself masked), and I didn't fancy building a system entirely out of beta ebuilds, so I set about cobbling myself an ebuild.
First problem was jpeg-8, but arekm had pointed at a patch for this, and it turns out the existing Gentoo ebuild also contains the same patch, so in the end there wasn't much to do, once an appropriate set of configure options had been determined, and the random unhelpful dependencies removed. (I think it was really only virtual/perl-Module-Load that tried pulling in perl 5.10.)
Next step was importing and converting the database. zmupdate.pl tripped over the lack of the ZM_USE_DEEP_STORAGE entry, but seemed to run OK once that one entry (snagged out of the create sql file) had been added manually.
Then the fun began. I had a lot of trouble getting the zmc processes to start. I've got a couple of single-chip-multi-input Bt878 cards, and each one gets fed two cameras. It turned out that I needed to:
- Set all the cameras to V4L2 (they'd come up as V4L1 initially).
- Find out which channels they were actually getting input on (cue much twiddling with xawtv)
- Figure out exactly which type of video they now needed to be set for. Previously they'd been PAL/Grey and PAL/RGB24. The PAL/Grey worked OK in V4L2, but I had to experiment a bit before eventually discovering that PAL/BGR24 seemed to work for the card getting the colour cameras.
- Figure out why I saw output sometimes from one camera and sometimes from the other, apparently at random. This turned out to have two contributing causes. First, V4L_MULTI_BUFFER (in Options->Config) needed de-selecting. Then both cameras on one card needed to be set to use the same frame rate etc.
- Then I tripped over the slight change to the argument passes to filter commands. It used to be a path relative to the events directory, but now it's the full path. When your filter handling script also goes and adds the event path...