I have finally got my installation of zoneminder 1.30 working on my Ubuntu 16.04 desktop machine. I fought the installation for several days just to find out that what I saw in the instructions was what I wanted to see and not what was really there. Anyway, that is another story.
To have some cameras to "play" with, I bought two DaHua DH-IPC-HFW1320SP cameras. These are new 3MP IP cameras with PoE that are English language, fully firmware upgradeable, and DaHua branded from an authorized DaHua distributor in China. A third camera with motorized zoom hasn't arrived yet. After I got them working with zoneminder, I wanted to expand my knowledge and read that for what I want to do, I would probably be better off using multicast instead of a point-to-point protocol. I would like to view the cameras from a number of sources, at least in the initial setup stages, and maybe use two servers to have redundant data.
The DaHua cameras support multi-casting, and here is how they are initially configured in the camera's network settings:
Enabled
Multicast address - 224.1.2.4 (I have changed one of the cameras to 224.1.2.5)
Port 40000 (main stream)
Port 40002 (Sub stream)
I have tried massaging several of the monitor definitions like Source Type, source path, remote method, options, etc., but I have not yet found the key. At least I don't think I have. Any guidance in using multicast would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Wayne