ZoneMinder Forums

I have a camera (d-link dcs-5010l) that I have working just fine with zoneminder using MJPEG. It also has H.264 output, but while I've been able to isolate the stream I haven't quite figured out how to get that part working with zoneminder.

My question is simple... should I even bother with the effort to get h.264 capture working? It's a SD (not HD) camera, 640x480. It's happy to do 15 fps via mjpeg, and that's what I run my other cameras at. Is there any real reason for me to pursue h264 for this camera? It'd probably require a bit of leg work and hacking around, and I'm just wondering if there's any great reason to spend the time doing so. (i.e. "what's the payback?")

Thoughts?

You'll need to compare the streams on your machine. Have you used FFMpeg as the source for the h.264 stream? usually very painless.

bb99 wrote:You'll need to compare the streams on your machine.

I don't understand... compare them... for what?

Have you used FFMpeg as the source for the h.264 stream? usually very painless.

Yep, it says that it's locked on but doesn't grab any video, and eventually starts writing errors to the log. I had to run a network sniffer to find the actual url for the h264 stream. (VLC won't play it either, for what it's worth. Locks on, but no video.)

(I already have a working h264 high def camera, so I know *how* to get things working, they just don't out of the box with this camera. So I'm wondering if the pain is worth the gain, and so far I can't see any gain but am wondering if I'm missing something.)

Compare Mjpeg to rstp. Are you using FFmpeg on your other rstp stream? If not you got lucky. Rtp/rstp basically has been limited from the beginning of it's implementation and FFmpeg is the only way to bring in these streams to ZM. Search the forums and don't forget about the options switches that can be applied to your output.

bb99 wrote:Compare Mjpeg to rstp. Are you using FFmpeg on your other rstp stream?

Yeah, I'm using ffmpeg to receive my HD camera's stream.

Rtp/rstp basically has been limited from the beginning of it's implementation and FFmpeg is the only way to bring in these streams to ZM. Search the forums and don't forget about the options switches that can be applied to your output.

Hang on man, you're going a mile a minute here. What am I searching *for*? Nobody else has this camera (it's new), so searching for that doesn't help. As far as I can tell, the only options on the camera are configurable via its web interface, it doesn't have a command line at all! I've pretty much been using the wiki to configure zoneminder so far.

(And you can't search for "ffmpeg" because it's too common!)

Search the forums and don't forget about the options switches that can be applied to your output.

Still no idea what I should be searching for, any hints? Thanks.