ZoneMinder Forums

After much reading of forums and wikis, working around many problems, and messing with many config files I have finally gotten Zoneminder running on an Ubuntu 11.04 machine using an old TV tuner card I had kicking around as my first input. I have a camera set up, I figured out how to get video actually happening in Zoneminder (had to mess with setting the right directory for Mootools, as other threads about ZM/Ubuntu have mentioned), and now I'm trying to get recording on motion detection happening. At the moment I have just this one camera set up, set to "Mocord"

Here is the problem I'm running into.

Zoneminder picks up motion on my camera, in my test example the motion happened to be my cat running around the living room... It begins recording, and then it NEVER stops recording, even long after the motion has stopped. The event log for that camera will have one event at the top with a Cause of "Motion" and then will be filled to the brim with events with the cause "Continuous," each of them the maximum record time allowed per event/segment, and it never stops.

Obviously, this totally defeats the purpose of having motion detection. If I wanted my camera to record constantly, I would have just set it to "Record."

Why is this happening? What does the cause "Continuous" mean? I can find nothing relevant about it in the documentation. More importantly, how do I make it stop?

Hi,

What ZM version are you using?

mastertheknife

I don't have the version number in front of me, because I'm at work (ZM machine is at home). It is the latest version from the Ubuntu repositories, which Synaptic reports as 1.24.2-8ubuntu1. So I suppose I would call it 1.24.2.

Here is some additional information:

- I am running version 1.24.2.
- Even if I delete my zone for the single camera I have so I have zero defined zones, Zoneminder records constantly and for no reason the instant I set my camera's mode to "Mocord." That is to say, no motion detection should be happening at all because I have no defined zone, yet it still records constantly.
- If I click "Disable Alarms" on the Feed window, it stops recording. The second I click "Enable Alarms" it starts recording for no reason again.
- The "Continuous" events have an alarmed pixels count of zero, a score of zero, and a duration of the maximum clip size I've set (which is 60 seconds). If motion does occur during one of these "continuous" clips, the event will have an alarmed pixel count and a motion score, but recoding still does not end at the end of the time limit.
- I can find absolutely no documentation online anywhere, and I have searched for hours, about what a "Continuous" event means.
- I have gone into the configuration and set "EVENT_CLOSE_MODE" to all three options, and the problem persists in all of them.

What am I doing wrong?

In Mocord mode, zoneminder should record constantly. Mocord is basically Record + Modect together.
For just motion detect, use Modect mode.

mastertheknife.

I must have misread the wiki then, and came to think that "Mocord" would record events, whereas "Modect" would trigger alarms/set triggers/send emails/whatever, but not record anything.

Yea this is rather confusing, Mocord (to me, and at least the orgional author of this thread, and I image a lot of other people as well) means Motion - Record. Modect on the other hand I see as Motion Detection (IE just trigger an alarm, but do not record).

This really should be changed or at least clarified in zoneminder itself... I mean yea it was easy enough to figure it out thanks to google and the internet and these forums, but I for one grow oh so tired of being so reliant on google to do pretty much anything anymore..... is it a conspiracy to MAKE google and all this REQUIRED? I am starting to think this is very much true... and I very much dislike it. Like to the point where I would take up arms and fight to the death over it. Seriously, just about up to that point... I guess the 'right' thing to do would be to just throw out all the tech, or just go with it and submit to being subjugated to ads and false information and other crap... but I think I would rather put an end to such nonsense... decisions decisions