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A deeper dive into the login process

As you might have seen above, there are two ways to login, one that uses the login.json API and the other that logs in using the ZM portal. If you are running ZoneMinder 1.32.0 and above, it is strongly recommended you use the login.json approach. The “old” approach will still work but is not as powerful as the API based login. Here are the reasons why:

        The “old” approach basically uses the same login webpage (index.php) that a user would log into when viewing the ZM console. This is not really using an API and more importantly, if you have additional components like reCAPTCHA enabled, this will not work. Using the API approach is much cleaner and will work irrespective of reCAPTCHA
        The new login API returns important information that you can use to stream videos as well, right after login. Consider for example, a typical response to the login API (/login.json):

{
    "credentials": "auth=f5b9cf48693fe8552503c8ABCD5",
    "append_password": 0,
    "version": "1.31.44",
    "apiversion": "1.0"
}

In this example I have OPT_AUTH enabled in ZoneMinder and it returns my credential key. You can then use this key to stream images like so:

<img src="https://server/zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms?monitor=1&auth=<authval>" />

Where authval is the credentials returned to start streaming videos.

The append_password field will contain 1 when it is necessary for you to append your ZM password. This is the case when you set AUTH_RELAY in ZM options to “plain”, for example. In that case, the credentials field may contain something like &user=admin&pass= and you have to add your password to that string.