Getting time stamp on Video with H264 passthrough

[girkers]

I have read the forums and found that as the video is directly passed through when using H264 passthrough you cannot get the time stamp on the video and if I wanted to get the pretty time stamp on my video I have to use x264 encode.

Having done a test I found that server load aside, not an issue for me, I found that using the x264 encode, whilst adding the pretty time stamp, caused other unwanted side effects. Firstly the frame rate drops, on a H264 PT I get 15fps, with x264 I only got 11.420fps and the x264 drops the audio stream.

I get the reason why H264 PT cannot add the time stamp, but is there another way to get this information with the video file currently in Zoneminder?

My suggestion would be to write this information to the Metadata of the video file, currently with my H264 PT video, ZM changes the Metadata of Movie name to "Zoneminder Security Recording", would it be too much to ask if ZM could add some more Metadata to the MP4. Obviously the functionality is already in there, it would seem simple enough to add some more tags to the file with little overhead.

Cheers,

Girkers

[SteveGilvarry]

Girkers,
Nice idea, I think Icon was talking about being able to add overlays to passthrough video. But might not be so soon, unless someone else sees it and wants to check out how to do it. Project can always use people willing to roll up their sleeves.
I just put the camera timestamp on as I like that in the video, is that an option for you?

[girkers]

I can add the information from the cameras but that sort of defeats the purpose.

I would like to help, but I am not a programmer, any suggestions on what I could do to move this in a positive direction?